Synopsis

(Dennis Dillman)

PROJECT MERCURY - TO PUT A MAN IN SPACE

NAPEX 2005 Synopsis

This exhibit portrays, mostly in chronological order, the development and flights of Project Mercury, America's first manned spaceship, via covers supplemented with postcards. There are a plethora of covers available to commemorate Project Mercury. I have chosen to scope my exhibit so as not to show every cover available for Project Mercury which would become repetitive, but to concentrate on the rarest covers and the covers that tell the story the best. In my opinion, the most notable covers in this exhibit include:

1) A cover from the Navy Technical Mission - Europe (NAVTECMISEU) from 1945. The NAVTECMISEU was the first group of Americans to debrief the German rocket team of Wernher vonBraun after WWII, paving the way for America's development of rocket boosters for Project Mercury. There is no census of known covers from NAVTECMISEU, but I know of only three.
2) A cover flown aboard the manned X-2 rocketplane on July 23, 1956 when it set a new speed record of almost three times the speed of sound, important because this and other X-2 flights demonstrated that man could survive in the near-space environment. The Ellington-Zwisler Rocket Mail Catalog Vol. II (1973) lists this cover as catalog number United States 81. The number of covers carried is not known (I even corresponded with the test pilot before his death, but he did not remember), but it had to be a very small number due to weight and volume restrictions.
3) A ship's stationary cover from the USS Lake Champlain postmarked May 5, 1961 when she recovered Alan Shepard, America's first man in space. The ship's postmaster stated that he processed 44 covers that day and subsequent research by the Space Unit has shown that less than 15 were on ship's stationary (ref: Primary Recovery Ship Handbook by Ray E. Cartier, 1993, page 2. Also an ongoing census of Lake Champlain covers by Dr. Reuben Ramkissoon of the Space Unit). Faked versions of this cover do exist and are well known. The fakes are detectable because they are on postal stationary with discrete anomalies inside the cancel hub (ref: Study of Suspect Space Covers by Paul Bulver, Dr. Reuben Ramkissoon, and Lester E. Winick, compact disc, Space Unit, 2001, Chapter 1, page 3) . The cover in this exhibit is not one of the fakes.
4) The "Captain's Cover" from the USS Kearsarge for the recovery of Wally Schirra's Mercury flight on October 3, 1962. This is notable because the Captain of the ship did not have special cachets printed for his use on recovery day, unlike several other Mercury recoveries. He mailed out some covers that day under his corner card on penalty envelopes and these have become extremely hard-to-find in the collector community.
5) The "Captain's Cover" from the USS Kearsarge for the recovery of Gordon Cooper's Mercury flight on May 16, 1963. Same rationale as #4 above.