Insurance!

One of the greatest things about having a job is that you get insurance coverage. Most of us are fortunate enough to be able to know that if we fall down go boom on the patio, the hospital and doctor bills will be covered and we won't have to take on a paper route forever to pay them ourselves.

By the way, did you ever wonder why it's expensive to have trees removed or trimmed back? The guy who did some tree work here at the Lazy 'C' Ranch a couple years ago told me his daily insurance nut is $750. It's pretty steep to cover people who work at some pretty steep heights.

When the Apollo 11 astronauts—Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins - took a business trip of 238,900 miles, rocket-propelled at thousands of miles per hour, the trip was so parlous that the president of the United States already had his speech prepared to read to the nation in case everything went wrong on the moon and Armstrong, Aldrin, and Colloins were to be marooned there, fated for death.


It's not hard to figure why NASA was not in a position to offer them a nice life insurance package. They had an insurance plan, sure, but it “originally did not cover astronauts when flying—it was considered high risk and experimental,” says Brandi Dean, a spokesperson for NASA’s Johnson Space Center. All three men had families, but they had to find their own way to offer security for the wives and kids.  After all, just two years before, three astronauts had died in a flash fire on the launch pad in Florida.

They really did come up with a great way to rack up some coin just in case. As the launch day approached, they spent their hours of pre-flight quarantine autographing hundreds of envelopes that had been made up with a special design commemorating their mission and Apollo postage stamp. The plan was to have the envelopes postmarked, either on the day of the the launch or the day of the Moonwalk, and then those envelopes would be very valuable to autograph collectors and history buffs.
 

Howard C. Weinberger, an expert on all things Apollo, says, “It was driven by the fact that, given the nature of the astronauts’ livelihood, they were not able to secure much life insurance.”  He figures that there were between 500 and 1000 signed envelopes.

Stamp collecting was a very big deal at the time, and the families banked a bit of money after the men all came home to heroes' welcomes. Other crews continued the practice, which came to an abrupt halt when the crew of Apollo 15 came up with the idea of taking the envelopes to the moon with them, thereby putting the value of each out of this world.  So to speak.

The value of these "insurance covers," as they are known to philatelists, goes up every day, and why not? These men took huge risks to take us to that new frontier, and letting their family prosper is only fair.