posted 10-01-2017 10:42 PM               

They don't know who it is either, but it may help put the individual in context, as it's a cover cacheted for the "space shuttle external tank rollout," postmarked MSFC Sept. 1977, and also signed by Oscar Holderer.

The same cachet with the same postmark and the same signers was also sold as part of item 372008312812.

posted 10-05-2017 01:45 PM               

And he looks nothing like that (here's a photo where's not in the shadow of a hat — he's the one in the flight suit). Especially when you adjust for the time difference between the photos, Cuypers, born in 1959, is (and visibly looks) much younger than the gentleman in question.

And then, of course, there's the issue of why collectors would get him on multi-signed shuttle pieces when the other signers were actually involved in the shuttle in some capacity. I've seen some covers that don't seem to follow much of an internal logic, but never a multi-signed piece where one of the signers, by any stretch of the imagination, had no right to be there.

Not to mention that, while it's possible that they were all done by the same person, there were some differences that lead me to believe that they were done by separate collectors, which further reduces the likelihood, as I can't see multiple people deciding to add him to a von Braun engineer signed shuttle cover or building a multi-signed cover around a Raymond Cuypers autograph.