posted 10-24-2021 09:54 AM               

Space Cover #627: Gemini 2 Unusual Beck Crew Cover

My selection for Space Cover of the Week this week commemorates the launch of Gemini 2 and has an unusual Beck Crew Cover cachet.

Gemini 2 was the second and final unmanned test of the Gemini spacecraft. Project Gemini was the effort to put a pair of astronauts into orbit and test out the various mission parameters that it would take to get to the moon. Project Gemini highlighted increasingly longer duration space flight, rendezvous between two spacecraft, the docking of two spacecrafts, high altitude flight using the Agena upper stage, and extravehicular activity. All of these would need to be mastered so that a Project Apollo, using the lunar orbit rendezvous technique would be successful in putting a man on the moon before President Kennedy's goal of the end of the decade.

The above cover is postmarked for the launch of Gemini Titan-2 on January 19, 1965. It has a Cape Canaveral machine cancel. What is most unusual about this cover is that it has a Beck printed cachet that happens to be a Crew Cover.

Morris W. Beck produced cachets and provided a service to collectors to have their covers postmarked aboard the recovery ships for each individual flight. These covers have a small number on the bottom noted as "BXXX". These numbers corresponded to a particular ship. However, due to the fact that the covers were sent through a coordinator, not all numbers made it to the corresponding ship.

Beck also provided similar rubber stamp cachets to the ships for collectors who did not use his service. Beck provided covers to the crews of the ships to thank them for their efforts in postmarking the covers. These are the same as the printed cachets but do not have the Beck number included. These became known as Beck Crew Covers and are highly sought after. Beck Crew Covers postmarked on board ships are very rare with reported quantities around 25 or so. For more information on Beck covers please see Owen Murray's fantastic website.

Beck Crew Covers postmarked in cities are exceedingly rare. The one pictured is most appropriate as it is postmarked in Cape Canaveral for the launch. It is unknown how many of this particular cover exists, but it can't be very many. I picked up to cover the number of years ago from the collection of Richard E. Learn. Dick was a very good friend of mine who had an uncanny knack for finding very rare and unusual recovery ship covers.

Do you have any Beck Crew Covers postmarked in cities? Let us see them.

posted 10-24-2021 11:01 AM               

Offhand Eddie, do you know why Morris Beck indicated that GT-2 was the "First Unmanned Flight" of the Gemini series? It looks like perhaps an earlier unused Beck Crew Cover produced for GT-1 was used for GT-2 as the first Gemini flight test was about 10 months earlier in 1964?

With only about 25 covers known of this rare variety onboard the Navy recovery fleet vessels, that does seem like a very low number with hundreds(+) of ship personnel assigned to the recovery ships. Perhaps they were only distributed to higher-ups, VIPs, or other key officials?