- Year
- 1971
- By
- U.S. Post Office, Cape Canaveral, Fla.
- Published
- Cape Canaveral, Fla.: U.S. Post Office.
- Edition
- English. Cacheted cover, franked and postally used.
- Ciancone
- N/A.
- Shelf
- Box 5
- Catalog
- Catalog E · Miscellanea
A commercially printed cachet cover, not a First Day Cover: the 6¢ stamp affixed is the ongoing 1970–74 “Flag over White House” definitive, first issued over a year earlier in Washington, D.C., and unrelated to this flight.
What makes the cover collectible is its postmark — a standard Cape Canaveral, Fla. machine cancellation dated “JAN 31 PM 1971,” the afternoon of Apollo 14’s actual launch at 4:03 p.m. EST, after a 40-minute weather delay. This kind of cover, franked with ordinary postage and mailed through the post office nearest a launch to catch a same-day postmark, is a “launch cover” or “event cover” in space-philately terms, distinct from a First Day Cover, which specifically marks a stamp’s own first day of issue.
The cachet itself — “Apollo Fourteen to the Moon” over a crew photo of Mitchell, Shepard, and Roosa framed by the Apollo 14 mission patch — is addressed to a Rockledge, Florida post office box a few miles from the Cape, the kind of self-addressed return common among collectors and dealers seeking a verifiable launch-date postmark on their stock.