posted 05-02-2021 10:50 PM               

Space Cover 606: One of the Earliest STS Covers

President Richard Nixon approved a $5.5 billion program to develop the space shuttle in January 1972.

Covers related to the shuttle program are relatively hard to find prior to October 1974 when Robert Rank began his detailed series of Space Voyage covers that literally covered several thousand tests during the Shuttle program lifetime.

This image shows one of Rank's earliest shuttle test covers. A 12 foot — a 6.8% scale model — space shuttle model was created. This model underwent a set of static test firings at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

The cover depicted was for the third acoustic test, liquids only, and the engine run at less than full power on October 29, 1974. The test objective was to measure stress, vibration, and noise levels.

This series of tests are usually the earliest covers that appear in space shuttle collections that contain events other than the actual shuttle flights themselves. Because of this, the value of these early space shuttle tests tend to be significantly above the typical space shuttle test covers.

Anyone have earlier shuttle covers to share?

So if you find one (or better yet the set of them) in a dealer dollar box you just might want to grab it!