Astrophilately

Astrophilately is the area of philately connected with astronomy and efforts to reach outer space, both manned and unmanned.

Topics of interest include postage stamps, cancellations, and covers connected to various projects. Examples include rocket mail, dating from as early as the 1928, and mail actually carried on space flights, a practice that began with Project Apollo missions, and has continued since then. Specialists distinguish astrophilately from topical collecting with a space theme; astrophilatelic items are those with direct connections to space missions, whether or not they include any special pictorial depiction.

The Fédération Internationale de Philatélie has a Section for Astrophilately. Included are covers and cards cancelled at launch sites, tracking stations, Mission Control facilities, research laboratories, and recovery ships. Many, though not all, such items have cachets produced for the mission; others are recognizable only with specific knowledge of the postmark location and date corresponding to a launch.

As with regular airmail, items of mail carried aboard spacecraft are known as "flown covers". They are known from both Soviet- and American-flown missions. While some types are rare, others, such as space shuttle covers, were carried in large numbers, and are thus relatively common, costing less than US$50.

Perhaps the most common item of astrophilately is the "STS-8 flight cover". In cooperation with the USPS, the shuttle flight STS-8 carried several hundred thousand covers, franked with $9.35 express mail stamps, which were then sold to the public after the shuttle's return. The original plan was to carry 500,000, but the final number was reduced to 261,900, of which 2,523 were damaged during the flight and discarded. The remaining covers were each enclosed in a souvenir folder describing the mission and the cover, and sold for $15.35 each. They were sold out by November 1983, just a few months after the flight.

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