posted 10-06-2024 11:24 AM               

Gemini 8 Launch Cover With A Beck Recovery Cachet

Sometimes when collecting... well anything, questions can arise. We are a questioning species so it makes sense. Case in point is the cover pictured above. Why does a Gemini 8 cover postmarked for the launch end up having a Beck rubber stamp cachet which was produced for use by the US Navy and intended to be used on recovery ship covers?

Gemini 8 was launched with the intention of becoming the first docking of two spacecraft on orbit. Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott were launched on March 16, 1966. This cover is postmarked for the launch with a Kennedy Space Center cancel. What the cover did not receive was the Official NASA Cachet (ONC). Most covers postmarked at KSC from SA-10 through the Gemini and Apollo programs plus a few miscellaneous launches received the Official NASA Cachet, though there were obviously some exceptions. This cover is one of them. No explanation as to why it did not receive the ONC.

What this cover does have is a Beck rubber stamp cachet used by the U.S. Navy on recovery ship covers. Morris W. Beck produced a numbered set of printed cacheted covers for a subscription service and then supplied rubber stamp versions of the cachets to the US Navy to be used on the prime and secondary recovery ships for each mission. Again, no explanation why this particular cover has a recovery cachet.

The biggest question becomes how did a launch cover receive a recovery cachet presumably from a ship hundreds of miles from the launch site? I'm sure that question will never be answered. Now, its not the first incident of a Beck cover, printed or RSC, to not be postmarked on a recovery vessel. It is the only one I have seen with a KSC cancel. Others may exist. Do you have any in your collections?

posted 10-06-2024 01:12 PM               

For Beck printed...

Here is a image of some Beck KSC cancels from a quick scan of Owen Murray's website: Apollo 7 (Kunder - cover coordinator) and Apollo 14 (Ray Burton).

posted 10-07-2024 03:57 AM               

To be pedantic there are a number of known Beck covers that were deliberately sent to Cape Canaveral for splashdown date cancellations, including the Apollo 14 covers imaged above in Tom's post... but I think to really qualify for Eddie's category the Apollo 14 cover should have been cancelled on 31st January 1971 (launch day), rather than 9th February (splashdown day).

Also, some early missions had the same launch and splashdown date, so it would be difficult to assign them into this particular topical category.