posted 08-16-2026 08:33 PM               

Space Cover 869: Astronaut's Hotel

The space cover this week is a relic of the early days of manned space travel and a reminder that each astronaut had responsibilities outside of space flight preparation and mission related activities. The cover is machine cancelled at Cocoa Beach, Florida on July 12, 1961. The envelope is from the Holiday Inn at Cocoa Beach and is hand-addressed by the first American in space, Alan Shepard.

The envelope is part of correspondence to Doris S. Kreske, an administrative specialist at NASA who acted as Shepard's secretary. It is directed to Kreske as part of the Stenographer Pool at the STG, which was the Space Task Group based at Langley Field, in Hampton, Virginia, the home of Project Mercury. Two months later, in September 1961, Kreske and nearly 1,000 other Langley personnel made decision to embark on "the big move" to Houston, Texas to staff the newly constructed Manned Spacecraft Center. With her experience from Langley, she trained Johnson Space Center's first secretaries who handled correspondence for the astronauts based there.

The envelope sent to Kreske in 1961 contains a letter from the day before, July 11, written by Shepard instructing her to "handle these" which directly related to her answering some fan mail he was receiving, no doubt in tremendous amounts, since his successful sub-orbital flight on May 5, 1961.

What also makes this cover interesting to me is that Shepard has listed his room number at the hotel in the upper left corner as #207. It put the letter in perspective that he, along with the other Mercury 7 astronauts were guests of the hotel and living their lives outside of the fame and notoriety of being a national hero. They routinely stayed at the Holiday Inn during their time at the cape and this cover was mailed around the time Gus Grissom would have been preparing for his Liberty Bell 7 flight. Grissom would ultimately launch on July 21, 1961, just over a week after this was mailed.

The Holiday Inn which later became the International Palms, was demolished in 2023 to make way for a new resort and conference center development on the space coast.

Do you have other stationary or envelopes from this time period for the Holiday Inn or other hotels in the area?

posted 08-17-2026 12:00 PM               

The seller was the son of the person who had the astronauts sign the sheet and explained that his father worked on the space program with ITT and so had the opportunity for the astronauts to sign the sheet.

He explained that in his excitement as a ten year old, he tore the envelope open to find the signed sheet inside and also didn't store it well. This explains the poor condition of the envelope, with the signed sheet, fortunately, in much better condition.

You'll note that the envelope that the signed sheet was mailed in was postmarked on December 19, 1961 - after Grissom's flight and about 2 months before Glenn's. This comes from a great time in early US space history.