posted 12-28-2025 11:07 AM               

Space Cover 838: Space History, Space Fantasy, Space Future

I was 8 years old when Apollo 11 launched fulfilling President John F. Kennedy's promise of landing a man on the moon before the decade was out. Growing up in the 1960's during the full excitement of the "space race," there was such incredible promise about the future of space travel. Since the 1950's dreams of rocket ships, moon colonies, and trips to Mars were thought to be a soon to be reality.

The paintings of Chesley Bonestell in LIFE magazine conjured up space travel like never before. His incredible paintings of space travel and planets combined with stories brought to life through science fiction made everyone interested and eager for the next step in space. It almost seemed like a certainly that after the moon was colonized we would be headed to Mars and beyond!

An early project to aid in putting Americans on the moon was the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform launched on Oct. 4, 1964. According to Wikipedia, the Interplanetary Monitoring Platform was a program managed by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, as part of the Explorers program, with the primary objectives of investigation of interplanetary plasma and the interplanetary magnetic field. The orbiting of IMP satellites in a variety of interplanetary and Earth orbits allowed study of spatial and temporal relationships of geophysical and interplanetary phenomena simultaneously by several other NASA satellites

As the painting on this cover shows, we were on the way to seeing a real Buck Rogers flying through space!!

The United States Postal Service has issued many space-related postage stamps celebrating U.S. space accomplishments.

Many of you will understand for obvious reasons my favorites are the 1969 First Man on the Moon stamp designed by my father Paul Calle, and the 29-cent 1994 Moon Landing anniversary stamp designed jointly by me and my father.

This combo stamp First Day Cover includes an excellent summary of space history. Depicted is the Apollo 11 moon landing, rocket science pioneer Robert Goddard, President John F. Kennedy, Apollo 8 Earthrise, Project Mercury, and Ed White's Gemini spacewalk, which is another of my father's stamp designs.

Other U.S. stamps depict a future in space that back in the 1960's seemed like foregone conclusions especially to young children. A set of five Space Fantasy stamps displays in all it's sci-fi glory what our future will be.

The mail will even be delivered to space colonies in this set of four stamps!

That has been the dream, a continued presence in space and continued progress toward exploring the universe, right!?

As with all good things life takes over. In the 1960's and early 70's the Vietnam War, civil unrest and budget cuts to NASA all took it's toll on interest in space travel in the United States. Sadly, the Apollo program was canceled. Then the space shuttle program came along and looked toward the future. With names for the orbiters reminiscent of past and future exploration like Columbia, Endeavour, Atlantis, Challenger and Discovery, we were poised for the next new adventures in space.

Space stations and space travel, untethered extravehicular trips, multi-country cooperation in space...

Flash forward to today. Space is exciting again and the outlook for future space exploration is bright.

People are excited, and not just those in the space community. The Florida Space Coast is buzzing and Kennedy Space Center is once again a hub of activity.

It seems like SpaceX is launching satellites every week, and Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket is ferrying space tourists beyond the Von Karman line. Former Apollo Grumman lead electrical engineer on the lunar module Marty Winkel has coined the term Karmanauts for these travelers, which seems quite appropriate. Not necessarily astronauts in the conventional way of thinking but they have seen the Earth from a unique perspective few have seen.

SpaceX is testing its Starship and Super Heavy rocket. Starship is the most powerful launch vehicle ever flown. As history has shown us with the early Mercury program tests, rockets will fail and they will explode fantastically all toward a better understanding of what needs to be accomplished to safely launch. We have seen this with Elon Musk and SpaceX, a willingness to test and fail, and test again to achieve information needed for the final result.

With the NASA Artemis Program planned mission to the moon early next year we may be on our way again. Reestablishing a human presence on the moon as a base toward future space exploration to Mars is a lofty and worthy goal for humankind.

Space future or space fantasy... only time will tell but I sure hope what we are seeing is the beginnings of a new age in exploration. To paraphrase Star Trek, to boldly go where no one has gone before, and beyond...

posted 12-29-2025 07:42 AM               

I go out of my way to add covers with fantastical and futuristic sci-fi imagery to my collection. There are numerous sub-divisions of art that can be brought under the overall concept of Futurism, but some are more "futurist" than others - for example, the Soviets were especially proficient with fantastical images of rocketry rendered in the brutalist style of communist posters (but they mainly did them to preserve the secrecy of their actual real-life rockets and spacecraft, and so are not really futuristic as such, just merely fantastical).

The real top-notch futurists lived way back before rocketry was an actual thing. I have tried to get properly meaningful philatelical covers for them, but finding artistic renderings of their vehicles is quite hard, as both the subject is obscure and the people involved lived a long time ago (in many cases even before philately itself was invented).
However, I have managed to acquire a few. I illustrate below a couple of examples, both of these are from the Baustein series of postcards from East Germany issued to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Space Age (25 Jahre Kosmische Ära) with special cancellations.

The one at top shows a ship and a wagon, both rocket propelled, as described and illustrated by the Venetian engineer Giovanni Fontana in his treatise 'Bellicorum instrumentorum liber'. He wrote the treatise circa 1420.

We need to pause a moment here - that is the year Anno Domini Fourteen Hundred and Twenty!

Fully five hundred years prior to when Robert Goddard launched the world's first liquid propelled rocket, 465 years before the motor car was patented, 420 years prior to the world's first postage stamp, and even Twenty years before the printing press was invented. A truly remarkable futurist.

The postcard beneath his shows Nikolai Kibalchich's design for a rocket propelled platform. It was written in prison before his death by hanging for his part in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. A futurist that affected history directly along two separate paths.

The next two images, above, show Futurist designs that are less fantastical. The concept for both were readily acceptable to science though neither had been technologically proven at the time these philatelic covers were produced in 1958 and 1964 respectively. They show a space station, and a planetary rover. And although space stations have been in existence for 54 years now (since 1971), we still haven't manufactured one that uses the spinning wheel concept to produce artificial gravity - though to be sure, we will in future {maybe}.
Lunar rovers have been things ever since Lunokhod-1 (moon landed in 1970), and were first used by spacesuited astronauts on the Apollo 15 mission — but again, we haven't manufactured a sealed air-breathable cockpit model, nor have we yet had a manned landing on a planet where we can use such a vehicle. These things will come to pass (maybe).