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Stamp Club History

The Early Covers

In May, 1971, I made up several envelopes for the first day of issue of the Missouri statehood stamp to be issued May 8. As that was also to be the launch date of the mission I was working on at JPL- the Mariner 8 mission to Mars- I thought that this would be a good commemorative cover. I carefully cut out several good black and white photocopies of the Mariner spacecraft of the right size, and glued them to the envelopes. Several weeks later I received them back from Independence, and put them in an album.

I realized then that I was not always going to be able to find pictures I could cut out, nor first days on the dates I needed if I wanted to continue preparing covers for JPL missions for my album. Then I discovered "space covers", which were cancelled at the site of the major US launches (Cape Canaveral or KSC for instance), or even on-board the ship recovering a capsule after re-entry from orbit. It seemed entirely appropriate that Pasadena, as the location of the JPL mission operations center, and the headquarters for the Deep Space Network tracking system for NASA planetary mission, was the appropriate cancellation for covers I wanted for my collection.

Mariner Venus Mercury (Mariner 10)

With the encouragement of members of the JPL Stamp Club, but no budget (we didn't have one), I designed a cachet and looked for ways to produce a few covers which were attractive and affordable. I found that the cost of printing 10 or 20 of these covers for our enthusiasts was prohibitive, but if the cachet were designed in such a way that it was tolerant of small printing misalignments, a simple, 3-color printing process could produce 1000 envelopes inexpensively. I advertised at JPL and in Linn's Stamp Magazine service to collectors that these covers would be available prepaid, and I received enough advanced orders that I could proceed with the printing. The advanced orders only covered the cost of stamps for 600 covers, and so that was what was produced of the first JPL Stamp Club cover, the Mariner 10 or Mariner Venus- Mercury (MVM) launch cover. (01b)

The covers were cancelled in Pasadena on November 2, 1973. In figuring out how to get this done, I began a long and happy relationship with the Pasadena Office of the Postal Service. At the time, Pasadena was the area center for handling and distribution of mail. This provided services which were cheerfully and promptly given to the Stamp Club. Mrs. Mary Ann King was the first of many managers of the retail sales office who provided great support. Mrs. Kay Wilson, the Postmaster at the time, was also very supportive.

The artwork selected was based on a silk-screen design produced for members of the MVM team by Vince Evanchuk- a mission engineer and a talented artist at JPL. It was very amenable to separating out the logo from the background, and a simple black border and lettering completed the picture and allowed for some variation in the registration of the colors.

The first mission event for MVM was a flyby of Venus (01a) on February 5, 1974. I didn't have the time to prepare a new cover for this event, and I also knew that the 1st Mercury encounter was the big event in this mission. So I started a custom of modifying previous cachets for significant flight events. In this case, I really was not planning until the last moment to commemorate this event, and so I could only prepare about 60 of the residual launch envelopes. The cachet was modified by covering the launch event legend with a "Venus Encounter" label. This unintentionally created the rarest of the club covers.

The first Mercury Encounter cover (02a) has the same cachet design as the launch cover, with the background color changed from blue to red, and the legend changed to "Mercury Encounter". Enough envelopes were printed to allow 300 covers for each of the following Mercury encounters. (The spacecarft was put into an elliptical sun orbit synchronized with Mercury's orbit so that they would meet about every 6 months- the first on March 29, 1974, then on September 21, 1974 and March 16, 1975). The subsequent encounter covers differed from the first encounter cover by the addition of a rubber-stamped "second" (02b) and "third" (04a) preceding the "Mercury Encounter" legend.

An added touch on these Mercury Encounter events was the use in the Pasadena Mail Handling Facility of a special cancellation die in the facer/ canceller with the inscription

MARINER 10 First Voyage To MERCURY

This special die was used on about one-fourth of the mail through the facility during the periods of the encounters, from the day of encounter for a week's time. The MVM project paid for the die, and many citizens were thus made more aware of these achievements.

Helios Launch

During this time, JPL was a partner with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the West German space agency in the solar science mission "HELIOS". JPL provided tracking, navigation, and science and mission design support, as well as initial mission operations capability. The covers produced for the launches of HELIOS 1 (05a) and HELIOS 2 (05b) (December 12, 1974 and January 14, 1976 respectively) have the same cachet design, based on the logo from the German spacecraft developer MBB. Again, the cachets differ by the addition of the word "second" in the legend. The precedent of using a project logo for launch was now established. Each future mission launch cover attempts to incorporate the project mission logo as the theme.

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