posted 02-18-2021 11:50 AM               

STS-51L signed launch cover

One of the most difficult to find crew-signed covers is one for the Challenger disaster. Until last month, this was the one which kept me from having signed covers for every U.S. space mission through STS-51L in 1986. But I was fortunate enough to obtain one when two local dealers asked me to help a man who had inherited a cover for which neither of them knew what to tell him.

I was unable to give the man an answer to its value, as I had no record of ever seeing one sold. I suggested that he go to either RR Auction or Heritage Auctions, which is located in nearby Dallas, and I gave him the contact info for each of them. I told him that it would be worth at least $2,000 but that the auction house would charge him a fee of 20% or so and would also charge the buyer another 20% to 25%. I also told him that I had just sold several of my duplicates and that the most I could pay for the cover would be $1,700.

Ten days later, he contacted me and asked me if I'd still give him $1,700 for it. We met halfway between our homes, which was about 20 miles for each of us. He told me that his uncle, Lynn Breece, had left it for him. I recall Lynn from many years ago, and his nephew told me that Lynn passed away about 10 years back. The signatures looked great and the colored pen worded cachet was the type of cachet that Lynn had used on several covers back then. So we were both satisfied with the exchange.

I contacted a few SUers and one told me that Ken Havekotte had once told him that he, (Ken) had helped cancel KSC covers on the day of the Challenger disaster and had related that "fewer than a dozen fully signed crew covers" had been cancelled on that date. That explains why I'd never seen one. So now, for the rest of you to see, is my newest signed acquisition.

With this, the first U.S. manned cover, from Alan Shepard on, for which I do not have a full crew signed cover is STS-33 which landed on November 27, 1989. Before I could fill in autographs on that cover, Manley Carter died in a commercial plane crash and Kathy Thornton sent me a note reading, "I prefer to not sign blank covers." (I glued that note to an envelope and had that cancelled anyway.) I settled for having only Musgrave and Fred Gregory's signature on that mission. Later I got the next three flight covers signed and pretty much stopped getting crew signed covers after STS-31 on April 24, 1990.

posted 03-16-2021 08:55 AM               

I obtained my 51L cover a more standard way, through the mail from the 51L crew at JSC. First I obtained Greg Jarvis' autograph on the cover, then sent the cover to the crew at JSC and then on January 9, just 17 days before the crew was lost, received the cover in the mail and then signed by all seven.

So here now are shown two of only about a dozen complete 51L crew signed covers. The crew was, however, very good about signing, but Jarvis' late addition to the 51L crew resulted in few such covers completed, but a fair number of other covers signed by four, five and six.

This article from Florida Today shows the cover above held by Ken Havekotte and gives information on covers at the KSC post office on that horrible day.

posted 04-02-2021 08:19 AM               

Those recordings, at my suggestion, were handled by myself, representing the KSC-Orlando airport postal complex, and by Al Moore at the "on-site" KSC Headquarters Building postal station.

Ray's above posted fully crew signed cover was from the original collection of Lynn Breece, one of my long-time Florida-based space cover cancel customers, and his signed Challenger cover had been noted or recorded as being signed by all seven. I think Lynn had requested a HQS hand cancel with the killer bars, which had been done, as you can see from its cancellation.