posted 02-04-2023 07:26 PM               

The cS article credited the Fort Bliss Centennial (100th) anniversary in 1948 as the first stamp to picture a rocket or space vehicle. The 3-cent issue depicted a rocket at the center of the stamp design since the military compound at Ft. Bliss test-fired missiles and rockets after World War II. In the topographical world of philately, that would technically make it a space stamp.

The posting also indicated that the captured German V-2 rockets were first launched on American soil from Ft. Bliss in Texas, however, the 46-foot-high V-2s were test fired more than 50 miles north of Ft. Bliss at the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico.

But was the rocket seen at the center of the first U.S. space stamp a V-2 rocket itself? While it does look similar to an actual V-2 vehicle in early flight, its tail fin assembly doesn't quite match up to a real V-2. It has been my belief that the rocket artwork might had been an artist rendering interpretation representating other U.S. missile and rocket programs mostly by the U.S. Army during that era of the mid/late 1940's. The Ft. Bliss Centennial stamp designer was Charles Chickering of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Washington, D.C., but I failed to see any further information that he may had provided about the stamp rocket details.

Not only with the V-2, but also with another surface-to-surface vehicle, the Corporal M-2 missile, which was the first U.S. guided ballistic missile. It could travel 75 miles during that post war era.

Another military defense rocket, the MGM-29 Sergeant, was indicated in an earlier astrophilately article, of which I am still trying to locate, as a possible rocket stamp choice. But the Sergeant, another Army surface-to-surface missile program, first got started in the early 1950's after the stamp had its first day issue in November 1948.

At the time the Ft. Bliss stamp was released, the newest and most advanced rocket program at White Sands had been the Viking upper-atmosphere sounding rocket by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, looking similar to the V-2, but not completely. The first launch of Viking was in May 1949, just a few months after the rocket stamp had been released.

So what do you think the rocket on the stamp is — V-2, Corporal, Sergeant, Viking, perhaps a symbolic combination of them all, or should it not even matter?