Apollo 15 postal covers incident
The crew of Apollo 15—David Scott, Alfred Worden, and James Irwin—agreed to take payments for carrying the covers; though they returned the money, they were reprimanded by NASA.
In late 1971, when NASA learned that the Herrick covers were being sold, the astronauts' supervisor, Deke Slayton, warned Worden to avoid further commercialization of what he had been allowed to take into space.
[2] Collectors and dealers sought philatelic souvenirs related to the American space flight program, often through specially-designed envelopes (known as covers).
These small bags, with their contents limited in size and weight, contained personal items the astronauts wanted to be flown as souvenirs of the mission.
[10] The Apollo 15 mission began when the Saturn V launch vehicle blasted off from KSC on July 26, 1971, and ended when the astronauts and the Command Module Endeavour were recovered by the helicopter carrier USS Okinawa on August 7.
[14] The two had met by chance while on a bus to observe the launch of Apollo 12 in late 1969; Eiermann heard by Sieger's Swabian inflection that they were from the same part of Southern Germany, and invited him to his house.
[15][16] Eiermann lived in Cocoa Beach, Florida, near KSC, and was a local representative of Los Angeles-based Dyna-Therm Corporation,[17] a NASA contractor.
[20] In his testimony before a congressional committee in 1972, Scott described Eiermann as a "friend of ours", someone with whom he had dined and who knew many people at KSC, including a number of the astronauts.
Worden wrote that to ensure their families were provided for given the severe risks and dangers of their profession, the astronauts agreed to the deal, planning to put the payments aside as funds for their children.
Worden also related his insistence the covers must be held, unsold and unpublicized, until after the Apollo program had ended, and he had retired from NASA and the Air Force.
[32] According to a 1978 Justice Department report, before the Apollo 15 flight Herrick advised Worden that taking covers to the Moon would be a prudent investment because they would be valuable to stamp collectors.
[33] While Scott and his crewmates were completing their mission training, a controversy developed within NASA and Congress over some of the souvenir silver medallions the crew of Apollo 14 had carried to the Moon.
These were mixed with a large quantity of other metal, and commemorative medallions were struck from the mass, used as a premium to attract people to pay to join the Franklin Mint Collector's Club.
[40] Herrick secured the services of a commercial artist, Vance Johnson,[41] with whom Worden discussed the design, resulting in 100 envelopes depicting the phases of the Moon.
The agency also sent a backup, stowed in the Command Module with another cancellation device,[e] for use on the homeward journey if Scott did not get to postmark the lunar cover.
[51] All covers except the group of 400 had been authorized by Slayton,[52] who stated in his testimony that he would almost certainly have approved them if asked (assuming their weight could be negotiated with the Flight Manager), on condition that they stay in the Command Module and not go to the lunar surface.
[53] In July 1972, after the story broke, William Hines of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote that "the idea that this complicated caper could have been carried out without the knowledge and at least tacit permission of Slayton is regarded by people familiar with NASA as ludicrous.
Once the envelopes had been run through the cancellation machine, he took them to the astronaut quarters, where members of the Flight Crew Support Team vacuum sealed them in Teflon-covered fiberglass to fireproof them for space.
[g][63] At some point while the mission was en route to the Moon, the 400 covers were moved into the lunar lander Falcon; in his testimony, Scott agreed this violated the rules.
[75] The question of whether Carsey had improperly certified that the covers had been landed on the Moon (something she had no personal knowledge of) was the subject of an investigation by the Texas Attorney General.
[77] The remaining 300 were entrusted by the astronauts to a Houston-area stamp collector who arranged with a local printer to have an inscription stating that the cover had been carried to the Moon printed in the upper left.
[96] According to Low in his personal notes, during the investigation, Scott, who had to that point maintained that the astronauts had never intended to profit from the Sieger covers, disclosed the information about the German bank accounts.
[108] Due to the increasing publicity surrounding the incident, and concerned about the appearance of commercialization of Apollo 15, the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences set a hearing for August 3.
[110] Worden remembered that while there were difficult questions asked about the astronauts' conduct, part of the committee's concern was why NASA management had allowed another incident to happen so quickly after the Apollo 14 Franklin Mint matter.
[111] Because of the efforts of Fletcher and Low,[110] Anderson invoked a rarely used Senate rule for when testimony might impact the reputation of witnesses or others, closing the hearing to the public.
[115] Scott was made a technical adviser on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (the first joint mission with the Soviet Union) and retired from the Air Force in 1975.
[121] Among the astronauts interviewed in NASA's investigation was Apollo 13's Jack Swigert, who denied any dealings with envelopes; after he subsequently admitted he had, Low removed him from Apollo-Soyuz.
[128] The government concluded NASA either approved the covers or knew they would be aboard Apollo 15 and, in an out-of-court settlement, returned all the envelopes to the three astronauts in July 1983.
[128] In 2013, Corey S. Powell and Laurie Gwen Shapiro of Slate magazine suggested that the 1978 investigation "largely exonerated" the astronauts, and opined that the return of the covers in 1983 effectively rescinded the accusations.
"[114] In his memoir, Worden expressed remorse at what had happened, writing: "Even if I didn't break any formal rules, in hindsight I had broken an unspoken trust.
