But in at least several cases, those covers have been somewhere you’ll probably never go: the moon. And there’s a very good chance that many of these special envelopes shouldn’t have gone to the moon in the first place. The fact that some of them did may have cost a couple astronauts their jobs. Apollo 15 launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 26, 1971. Its lunar module landed on the moon’s surface four days later. The spacecraft carried three astronauts—Commander David Scott, Lunar Module Pilot James Irwin, and Command Module Pilot Alfred Worden—and 641 postage stamp covers. Of those 641, 243 were authorized by NASA, a common way for space missions at the time to create collectables marking the historic occasions. (Most likely, 250 were authorized, but miscounting or damage to some covers reduced the number actually brought into space to 243.) The other 398—400, minus two that were damaged and therefore discarded—were smuggled aboard. Before the Apollo 15 mission launch, a German stamp collector named Herman Sieger found out about the 243 NASA-authorized stamp covers and saw an opportunity.
