It’s hard to explain to those too young to remember the excitement of the space program of the 1960s. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 as the first man made orbiting satellite, there was a minor panic which soon developed into a space race. The rush to put people into space and onto the moon became tied up in national pride. But in a very real sense, the ten year mission that was an original part of the Kennedy presidency to put a man on the moon by 1970 was a wonderfully invigorating national goal.
Technology in the 1960s was primitive by today’s standards. There is a wonderful scene in the movie Apollo 13 where the space capsule going to the moon needs to be rerouted, and the engineers at the space center took out their slide rules (a slide rule is a calculating device that, like the abacus, has largely been relegated to museums). When John Glenn became the first man to orbit the earth, schools around the country brought television sets into the classrooms so we could watch. And still with all our wonderful technological advances, we still have done nothing greater that step onto the moon.
Philately has long been a part of space adventures. The moon astronauts carried covers with them to the moon, and philatelic items were even used as a form of life insurance (as you can imagine, John Hancock was not too keen on insuring John Glenn—although today, with product placement as important as it is, I would think that insurance companies would fight to name the next “Metlife orbiter”). The early astronauts autographed covers so their families could sell them in the event they didn’t come back.
Here is a John Glenn autograph cover on the First day of the Mercury stamp along with an autograph of Werner Von Braun. Space philately has ebbed in popularity as those of us who lived through the early space events have aged and our interest has waned. And younger people really have no sense of what it all meant. But think—just ten thousand years from living in caves, three thousand years after the beginnings of writing and just eighty years after the harnessing of electricity people actually walked on the moon. In our lifetime, nothing like that will happen again.