posted 09-10-2018 05:33 PM               

Space Cover 482: Apollo 13 USS New Cancels

There are a large number of collectors of manned space flight recovery ship covers. Many of the collectors are content with having a cover from the ship that participated in the recovery for a particular flight. Many of the recovery ships have the "Navy RSC" applied that was provided to the US Navy ships by Morris Beck or a printed Beck cachet applied by sending covers directly to Morris Beck.

Specialized collectors look for the different types of covers that were produced by the same ship – these can be different cancels (easy things like machine and hand cancels), different cachets (different color "Navy RSC" for the same mission), different Beck number printed cachets for the same ship, etc.

This Space Cover of the Week post takes a look at the various cancels from the USS New for the Apollo 13 recovery.

There seems to be three different versions of the USS New cancel that can be found on the recovery ship covers. The differences are based on the placement of the ship name "New" and format of the ship number "(DD-818)."

The first cancel has the complete "USS New (DD-818)" cancel that is typical of the "normal" ship cancels applied by the US Navy ship post offices. The closing parenthesis ")" can progress from being fully applied to only appearing as a single dot in its place as in the images above. On these covers the collector can definitely tell that the parenthesis was part of the cancel.

The second cancel has the closing parenthesis completely missing from the cancel. There are a significant number of these cancels on the recovery ship covers. Obviously, something was happening with the closing parenthesis to go from appearing completely in the cancel to completely disappearing to the point where it seems it was not in the cancel at all.

The third type of cancel is where the "DD-" and both parenthesis are missing so the cancel reads "USS New 818" with the placement of the "New" shifting with the shortening of the ship number.

Do you have copies of all three cancel formats?

There are lots of copies of all three types to be found so be sure to collect all three...