Apollo insurance covers
mementos from Apollo space missions
The Apollo insurance covers are autographed postal covers signed by the astronaut crews prior to their mission. The primary motivation behind this action was the refusal of life insurance companies to provide coverage for the astronauts. Consequently, the astronauts devised a strategy involving the signing of hundreds of postal covers. These were to be left behind for their families, who could then sell them in the event of the astronauts' deaths. The insurance covers began with Apollo 11 and ended with Apollo 16.
Background
The ability of astronauts to obtain much life insurance was limited, so they signed hundreds of postal covers before they left, on the presumption that they would become highly valuable in the event of their death. The crew would designate a trusted ally with the covers who would then have them cancelled at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) post office on the day of launch and/or on the day of the lunar landing.
Apollo 11 insurance covers normally fetch the highest prices because it was the first lunar landing mission.
There are three varieties of the Apollo 11 covers, four of Apollo 12, two of Apollo 13, two of Apollo 14, one of Apollo 15, and one of Apollo 16. Some astronauts also left behind single signed covers for their families.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4780320. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Apollo insurance covers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.