In the weeks before Apollo 11 launched, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins spent part of their quarantine signing hundreds of autographs, not for fans, but so their families could sell them if the mission killed them, since no insurer would cover astronauts at all.
A risk no insurance company would touch
By 1969, spaceflight had already killed. The Apollo 1 fire in January 1967 had killed all three of its crew during a launch rehearsal, a fact none of the Apollo 11 astronauts needed reminding of. Standard life insurance simply wasn’t available to them at any reasonable price, and even Lloyd’s of London, an underwriter known for covering unusual risks, declined to cover the crew. NASA itself was legally barred from providing life insurance to its astronauts, and their government salaries, Armstrong’s ran to $27,401 a year, left no room to absorb the kind of premium a private insurer might have demanded anyway.
The autographs were the workaround
The three astronauts entered pre-launch quarantine roughly a month ahead of the July 1969 mission. During their limited free time inside quarantine, they signed hundreds of postal covers, purpose-designed envelopes commemorating the mission, each carrying a postage stamp tied to an earlier Apollo flight. A group of Houston-based stamp collectors the astronauts had grown friendly with helped design some of the covers. Once signed, the envelopes went to an astronaut not flying the mission, who had them postmarked with a significant date, launch day or the day of the landing itself, then delivered to the astronauts’ families to hold onto.
The logic was straightforward. If Armstrong, Aldrin, or Collins died on the mission, their families would have hundreds of autographs from a fallen American hero to sell, at whatever price a grieving, fascinated public was willing to pay. It wasn’t a formal insurance product. It was a bet on their own fame outliving them, arranged by the three people in the best position to know exactly how famous that fame was about to become.
A plan for the worst case that went further than autographs
The covers weren’t the only preparation for the possibility of death. If Armstrong and Aldrin had been stranded on the lunar surface with no way home, NASA’s mission plan called for Mission Control to end communication with them rather than broadcast their final hours. A speech for President Nixon to deliver in that event, titled “In Event of Moon Disaster,” was drafted in advance by his speechwriter William Safire and kept on file, unused, once the mission succeeded. It opens by describing the astronauts, had they died, as men who had gone to the moon to explore in peace and would stay there to rest in peace, a line written for a contingency nobody involved wanted to need. Set next to that plan, the autograph covers look less like a curiosity and more like one part of a set of arrangements three men made, deliberately, for a mission they knew had a real chance of not bringing them home.
What happened to the covers
Apollo 11 returned safely, and none of the covers were ever sold under the circumstances they were made for. The tradition continued anyway. Crews on Apollo 12 through 16 signed their own insurance covers during quarantine, and every one of those missions also returned its crew alive. The covers themselves didn’t disappear. Starting in the 1990s, insurance covers from the Apollo missions began surfacing at space memorabilia auctions, where collectors now pay significant sums for envelopes that were only ever meant to be worth something if the men who signed them hadn’t come back. Individual Apollo 11 covers have sold at auction for anywhere from around $8,000 to well over $13,000 depending on type and condition, with a full set spanning several Apollo missions fetching $16,500 at one sale. There were, it turns out, three distinct designs among the Apollo 11 covers alone, cataloged by collectors as Types 1 through 3, with the rarest commanding the highest prices decades later.
What I find interesting about this
None of this was theatre. It was three men doing basic, practical estate planning with the only asset they had plenty of and that no underwriter would touch: their own signatures, on the eve of becoming three of the most famous people alive. The fact that it never had to be used is the story’s happy ending. The fact that they went to the trouble at all, quietly, during the last quiet weeks they’d have for years, says something honest about how they weighed the odds of the trip they were about to take.