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By in Uncategorized Comments Off on Galactic Homebrew Winners!

Galactic Homebrew Winners!

Thank you to all the competitors. It was a great and close competition.

Congrats to our winners!

1st: Todd Cogswell
2nd: Austin Ruuska
3rd: Pat Bowman

By in Uncategorized Comments Off on Apollo 11 Fact – Life Insurance

Apollo 11 Fact – Life Insurance

In 1969, Apollo astronauts were making about $17,000 a year. Not a bad amount of money for the time. But as someone whose job it is to climb into an experimental vehicle built by the lowest bidder, put that on top of an experimental rocket also by the lowest bidder, then get launched into space, life insurance was hard to come by.

Life insurance for an Apollo astronaut went for about $50,000. Needless to say, the astronauts couldn’t afford life insurance.

Neil Armstrong came up with a clever idea to help provide for the astronauts families should the worst happen. Shortly before launch, the crew was confined to quarantine to make sure they didn’t contract any earth based illnesses before their trip to the moon. Neil, Buzz, and Michael Collins spent some of that time signing hundreds of Apollo themed envelopes and postcards, called covers. The idea was, astronaut autographs were worth money, so the families could sell them if the astronauts died.



To make the autographs worth even more money, the stacks of covers were given to specific people with instructions on mailing them to the astronauts families on specific days. A signed cover is worth some money, but a signed cover post marked on the day of the Apollo 11 launch is worth more. So the covers were mailed in batches on important days of the Apollo 11 mission.



This tradition held throughout all of the Apollo missions except Gene Cernan’s Apollo 17 mission. Well, that’s mostly true.



The Apollo 15 astronauts caused a controversy when they secretly smuggled about 100 covers onto their space craft to make them even more valuable after they returned home. Needless to say NASA wasn’t happy with this and put an end to the process by Apollo 17. Or so they thought. It was revealed many years later that the Apollo 17 astronauts secretly continued the trend, but never spoke of it until Apollo 17 covers started appearing many years later.

One fun fact about the covers themselves is the stamps used on the covers were always commemorative stamps from previous Apollo missions. If you stumble across an Apollo cover in grandma’s attic, be careful with it. Apollo covers today can range from $10,000-30,000.