Apollo 15: To the Moon and Back

As humanity returns to the Moon after more than half a century, it is worth looking back at one of the most ambitious crewed lunar landing missions to date—and at an artifact that was part of it in 1971.

This Is One of the Finest Pieces in My Collection

Mission Overview

Let’s start with a quick look at the mission itself. On July 26, 1971, at 13:34 UTC, NASA launched Apollo 15 atop a Saturn V from Kennedy Space Center on the fourth lunar landing mission. The Apollo 15 crew consisted of Commander David “Dave” Randolph Scott, Command Module (CM) Pilot Alfred “Al” Merrill Worden, and Lunar Module (LM) Pilot James “Jim” Benson Irvin. Scott was a veteran of the U.S. space program (Gemini 8, Apollo 9), while Worden and Irvin were rookies.

^↑ The classic NASA lithograph (#MSCL-73) of the Apollo 15 crew and the mission patch alongside a NASA wirephoto taken during training with an LRV simulator on February 10, 1971, later signed by Al Worden.

After three days of flight, the spacecraft entered lunar orbit. One day later, on July 30 at 22:16:29 UTC, LM Falcon, carrying Scott and Irvin, landed on the lunar surface, while Worden remained in orbit in CM Endeavour. The two modules had separated at an altitude of just 6.7 miles above the surface. At the time, the Moon was just past its monthly apogee—its farthest point from Earth—nearly 250,000 miles away.

The landing site was the northernmost of all crewed lunar missions, located in the Apennine Mountains near Hadley Rille, a long, winding channel. This became the setting for an ambitious program of scientific fieldwork by Scott and Irvin: Apollo 15 was the first so-called J-mission, designed to go beyond precision landing and surface reconnaissance. The focus was on selenology—the geology of the Moon—including subsurface drilling. The astronauts later returned to Earth with 174 pounds of lunar samples, including the famous Genesis Rock.

The Legacy of Apollo 15

One of the mission’s defining innovations was the first-ever Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), better known as the “moon buggy.” Following the Soviet Lunokhod rover, it was the second motorized vehicle on the Moon and the first to carry passengers. With the LRV, the astronauts traveled more than 17 miles during their nearly 67-hour stay on the lunar surface, venturing up to three miles from Falcon. The LRV also enabled spectacular footage of Falcon’s liftoff from the Moon on August 2 at 17:11:23 UTC, broadcast live on television.

Another iconic moment occurred shortly before: Scott’s hammer-and-feather drop, demonstrating Galileo’s law of free fall by showing that a feather and a hammer fall at the same rate in a vacuum. Among the mission’s legacies is also the Fallen Astronaut memorial, erected by the crew on their own initiative to honor fallen space explorers, including Soviet cosmonauts. Only about a month earlier, the crew of Soyuz 11 had returned to Earth dead. Triumph and tragedy were closely intertwined at the dawn of the second decade of human spaceflight. As one of the highest-profile missions of that era, Apollo 15 demonstrated the still largely untapped potential of spaceflight.

Apollo 15’s achievements were not limited to the lunar surface. While Worden orbited the Moon, he continuously collected data from the CM. After reuniting with the LM, the Particles and Fields Subsatellite (PFS-1) was deployed into lunar orbit. While still relatively close to the Moon, Worden conducted the first deep-space EVA to retrieve film cassettes from the spacecraft’s exterior.

The astronauts finally splashed down on August 7, 1971, at 20:45:53 UTC in the North Pacific. The only major anomaly occurred when only two of the three main parachutes deployed. However, this did not endanger the safe splashdown near Hawaii, where they were recovered by the Navy aboard the USS Okinawa. After exactly 12 days, 7 hours, 11 minutes, and 53 seconds, the Apollo 15 mission concluded. It was the second-longest U.S. spaceflight at the time, after Gemini 7.

For more information on Apollo 15, the Encyclopedia Astronautica is a good starting point. Many additional details can be found in the Flight Journal, the Lunar Surface Journal, and the Apollo Archive’s photo collection. Particularly worth seeing is the reconstruction of Apollo 15 surface activities using modern imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter; this is also the ultimate debunking of all Moon landing deniers. For book readers, I recommend Exploring the Moon by David Harland² and the Sourcebook published by him and Richard Orloff³.

^↑ Launch-day cover with Prop and Wings cachet. This is a leftover from the original flown Sieger cover batch (briefly discussed later in this article). An estimated 600 copies of the envelopes, made on lightweight onion-skin paper (the insert shining through), were printed with the support of Alvin “Al” Bishop, a public relations executive of the Hughes Aircraft Company, space enthusiast and friend to many astronauts. His prints came to be regarded as the closest equivalent to an official Apollo 15 cover.

^↑ Launch-day covers with handstamped official KSC cachets (Type I). On the left side: signed by Rocco Anthony Petrone, Director of the Apollo Program at NASA Headquarters; for comparison, my example is illustrated in David Ball’s authoritative book American Astrophilately. On the right side: signed by members of the engineering team from Boeing, the prime contractor responsible for developing the LRV, led by project manager and chief design engineer Frank Musil.

^↑ Launch-day cover with “Shamrock” cachet, referencing the Irish heritage of astronaut James Irwin; produced by Ray Burton of the KSC Philatelic Society in an edition of 500. Eight of these also flew to the Moon. One of the few recipients of a flown cover was Forrest “Dusty” Rhodes, Chief of the Mail & Distribution Unit at the KSC, who signed my second example.

Apollo 15 & Astrophilately

Apollo 15 has remarkably deep connections to astrophilately, bringing us back to my Moon cover. To begin with: Among the mission’s non-scientific but highly visible firsts was Dave Scott becoming the first (and to date only) lunar postmaster on July 30, 1971, when he canceled the stamp pair United States in Space … A Decade of Achievement (Scott #1434 & 1435) on a prepared envelope.

This stamp pair depicts the lunar surface with Earth and Sun on the left, and the LM and LRV with two astronauts on the right—an image of the ongoing Apollo 15 mission, presented as the culmination of the manned spaceflight program to date. The stamps were designed by Robert McCall (also known for designing later mission patches). In doing so, he also created an aesthetically compelling homage to the 1967 stamp pair Accomplishments in Space (Scott #1311 & 1332), designed by Paul Calle.

With this philatelic ceremony on the Moon, broadcast live on television, a unique first-day cover was created. It was returned to Earth and remains in the collection of the National Postal Museum. So much for the official part of the story.

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^↑ Serialized event cover for the lunar landing. This is another creation by Al Bishop, with the USAF Astronaut Badge added. Like other Bishop covers, these envelopes were intended for the crew’s exclusive use and were partly used as so-called insurance covers. Some of the total print run—presumably a few hundred copies (note the numerous blank envelopes in Worden’s estate)—were evidently reused to celebrate the mission’s success.

How the Herrick Covers Came to Be

Less well known is that this was not the only cover to travel to the Moon (and back). Depending on the source, between 986 and 993 philatelic covers flew on Apollo missions, 641 of them on Apollo 15 alone—many unauthorized, if not outright smuggled. This led to a public scandal, which even has its own lengthy Wikipedia article and an entertaining YouTube episode of Exploring Stamps.

How did this scandal come about? The astronauts were allowed to take personal items into space, albeit to a limited extent due to weight and safety considerations. These items had to be stored in so-called Personal Preference Kits (PPKs), subject to prior approval by the Director of Flight Crew Operations, Deke Slayton. In Al Worden’s PPK were 144 envelopes exactly like the one I own, explicitly approved by Slayton.

These covers orbited the Moon 74 times aboard Endeavour before returning to Earth. This was made possible by a purely private arrangement between Worden and F. Herrick Herrick, a retired film director based in Miami, which allowed the covers to hitch a ride to the Moon.

After landing, Worden unpacked his PPK aboard the USS Okinawa. The Decade of Achievement stamps, brought aboard at the crew’s request, were affixed to all 144 Herrick covers and canceled in the ship’s post office. Thousands of additional covers (see examples) were also postmarked there, most of them bearing a rubberstamp cachet of the Navy Recovery Force. Collectors could submit their own envelopes, limited to two items per person due to high demand. A large portion of these cancellations, however, may not have been applied immediately after recovery but rather later, without distinction, after the return to Pearl Harbor.⁴

^↑ Event cover postmarked in Houston—the home of NASA’s Mission Control Center—on the final day of the mission, bearing a stamped KSC cachet (Type II) and an Apollo cachet typically associated with the Manned Space Flight Network. Such envelopes were handcrafted from actual tracking maps based on a concept by Matthew Radnofsky, best known for his work on iconic spacesuits, and his wife Eunice, herself well known among collectors.

From Pearl Harbor, the astronauts flew back to Houston, signing the Herrick covers along the way. Herrick later added private cachets for liftoff (“Launch July 26, 1971”) and splashdown (“Recovery Aug. 7, 1971”); an official KSC postmark for launch day could not be used because the covers had already been packed at that time. However, Herrick retained most of the covers, while 60 belonged to Worden.

A Scandal and Its Consequences

These processing steps resulted in variations among the Herrick covers in the placement of sticker cachets, signatures, stamps, postmarks, and even postmark ink colors. Clearly, the intention was to offer these striking covers to collectors at some point after the end of the Apollo program. Whether Worden and Herrick also had a financial agreement has never been disclosed—a sensitive issue, since PPK cargo was intended strictly for personal items, not for profit, especially given prior negative experiences on earlier missions.

But events took a different turn. Just a few weeks after the mission ended, in late October 1971, a collector contacted NASA to verify the authenticity of a Herrick cover offered for sale. Slayton warned Worden not to market the covers. But the damage had already been done, and the scientific mission Apollo 15 turned into a major controversy.

Indeed, Herrick was not the only one to have covers flown to the Moon. Among others, German stamp dealer Hermann Sieger had arranged, through an intermediary, for 100 covers to be carried aboard Falcon. These covers, which actually landed on the lunar surface, were not authorized cargo—but they were highly profitable. Almost all Sieger covers were sold in Germany by the end of September 1971 at a list price of 4,850 Deutsche Marks (about $1,500 at the time, equivalent to more than $11,000 today). NASA soon became aware of this, also through critical inquiries from collectors. By June 1972, the story had reached the broader American public through extensive media coverage.

The whole Apollo program was now overshadowed by a scandal, particularly damaging at a time when public enthusiasm for spaceflight had already declined due to its enormous costs. NASA initiated an internal investigation, accompanied by disciplinary proceedings against the three astronauts and even a congressional hearing. In an unprecedented move, NASA confiscated all flown covers it could recover—359 in total, including the 60 Herrick covers belonging to Worden.

These covers were initialed on the reverse by NASA’s Deputy General Counsel S. Neil Hosenball, hand-numbered, and then locked away for more than a decade. In retrospect, this makes it possible to trace quite clearly that my example indeed originates from Worden’s holdings. Such “accidental” provenance is a stroke of luck for collectors. In contrast, hundreds of similar pieces (along with highly convincing replicas) are likely in circulation that are virtually indistinguishable from genuinely flown examples.⁵

None of this was a stroke of luck for the three astronauts. Although they were not formally sanctioned—they had committed no legal offense—they were effectively punished in a way unique in NASA history: they were removed from their already assigned backup crew role for Apollo 17. Scott, Irvin, and Worden never received another flight assignment and soon left NASA, each on their own initiative after being sidelined.

The Long-Term Effects

The story of the Herrick covers did not end there. Years later, Worden filed a lawsuit against NASA to get his covers back, arguing that they had originally been approved cargo. He prevailed in an out-of-court settlement on July 19, 1983. On the same day, the former crew testified the authenticity of the numbered covers in individual notarized certificates. NASA’s willingness to return the covers was influenced by the then-upcoming Space Shuttle mission STS-8. In cooperation with USPS, 260,000 (!) covers were carried into space and subsequently sold—a clearly profit-oriented venture, though it remained an exception.

In fact, Apollo 15 also led NASA to adopt a “no cover” policy. Since then, American astronauts have been prohibited from carrying letters, envelopes, or stamps on missions, even as personal mementos. This rule remains in force today. It explains why “space mail” became primarily a Soviet and later Russian (and now also Chinese) specialty. In the history of spaceflight, it was not Dave Scott but, more than six years later, Georgy Grechko who was recorded as the first “space postmaster.”

Notably, astrophilately remains a sensitive subject within the American space program. Accordingly, one should not expect a flown Artemis cover.

For more information on flown covers, Howard C. Weinberger provides an excellent overview for Apollo 15. Also worth reading are the studies by Umberto Cavallaro⁶ and Derek Clarke⁷. Lester Winick played a major role in uncovering the scandal; his 1972 research has recently been republished.⁸ For German-speaking audiences, Charles Keller has compiled the facts.⁹

Footnotes

1. According to Hopferwieser, Walter M. (2019): Pioneer Rocket Mail & Space Mail. Compendium and Catalog. Bietigheim-Bissingen: Ch. Gärtner. ↩︎
2. Harland, David M. (1999): Exploring the Moon. The Apollo Expeditions, 2nd Edition. Chichester: Praxis Publishing. ↩︎
3. Orloff, Richard W./Harland, David M. (2006): Apollo. The Definitive Sourcebook. Berlin: Springer. ↩︎
4. Cartier, Ray (2011): U.S. Space Cover Collecting Handbook, pp. 135–136 and 141–143. ↩︎
5. Bulver, Paul C./Ramkissoon, Reuben A./Winick, Lester (2001): Study of Suspect Space Covers. Space Topics Study Group. 2nd Edition, see p. 3.42. ↩︎
6. See the appendix in his book: Cavallaro, Umberto (2018): The Race to the Moon Chronicled in Stamps, Postcards, and Postmarks. Cham: Springer Nature. This chapter is based on an article published in the Italian magazine Ad*Astra, which appeared shortly thereafter in English: Cavallaro, Umberto (2010): The Apollo 15 Cover Scandal, in: Orbit 87, pp. 25–29. ↩︎
7. Clarke, Derek (2024): The Apollo 15 mail cover scandal (Parts I & II), in: Orbit 142–143. ↩︎
8. Winick, Lester E. (2024–2025): U.S. Mail on the Moon series (Parts I through IV), in: Orbit 146–149. ↩︎
9. Keller, Charles (2020): Die Mondbriefe der Apollo Missionen, in: Space Phil News 194, pp. 9–44; reprinted 2022: Weltraum-Philatelie 284/286, pp. 23–56. ↩︎