A Missile as Mail Carrier
If someone told you that the postal service tried to deliver your mail using a missile originally designed to carry a 2,800-kiloton nuclear bomb, you'd think they were crazy. However, the US government tried to put it into practice in 1959.
Incredibly, in 1959, an intercontinental ballistic missile was launched from a submarine with 3,000 postal items on board, by the US Postal Service. Despite the outlandish idea, which seems like something out of an old James Bond movie, the missile and its cargo reached its destination: an army base in Mayport, Florida. The chronicle of the event doesn't record any statements from neighbors or possible witnesses of the arrival of the "mailman," but we have no doubt it must have been an event worth remembering to tell to misbehaving children.
Among the three thousand letters was a very special one, written by then-President Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower, as a way to express his support for the project. After the so-called landing, the postal service spokesman Arthur E. Summerfield rushed to declare: "before man reaches the Moon, the mail will travel from New York to California, to England, to India or Australia in hours, thanks to this missile system."
The Logic and the Legacy
Actually, the project had a certain logic. After all, it was nothing more than using all the technology that had made it possible, during the Cold War, to send 2,800 kilotons of nuclear explosives from one side of the world to the other, with a precision of tens of meters. And people saw these things as normal; indeed, many had been encouraged by propaganda to build nuclear fallout shelters in their backyards. It would be a peaceful use of wartime technology. Summerfield, in statements to the New York Times, rejoiced at the level of cooperation achieved between the Department of Defense and the Postal Service.
Fifty years later, those postmarked letters that traveled aboard the missile would be worth more than well in the philatelic market. In fact, it's a very common practice that experimental flights or space trips carry stamps that are postmarked in space, and then are bought at good prices by collectors.
The Rocketmail system was never implemented. It's quite possible that some general woke up one morning and discovered that it was quite dangerous to fire rockets of that size every so often and in all directions. And that's without counting the cost it would have and the number of vectors that would have to be used for the service to be useful: what good was a letter crossing the Atlantic in less than an hour if the service only worked once a week?
Rockets would carry mail again only ten years later, when Russian cosmonauts aboard Soyuz 4 received from the hands of their comrades on Soyuz 5 the letters that were sent to them from Earth. Apollo 11 also carried more than 200 postal items to the Moon, which once returned to Earth were bought by collectors.
