Whether you’ve ever applied for a life insurance policy or not (and if you haven’t, you should!), you probably have an idea of what questions to expect. The insurance company needs to know if you have any serious risk factors before determining your rate.

You can expect questions like:

How old are you?

Do you smoke?

What’s your weight?

Family history of diabetes?

Planning on any trips to The Moon?

Wait, what?

Okay, so that last one isn’t a common question. But it was a real problem in 1969 for Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, as they were preparing for their historic mission to land on the Moon. Fortunately for them, the mission was a success, and they landed on the Moon and returned safely to the Earth. However, before they made this groundbreaking accomplishment, the future was uncertain. Just two years earlier, three Apollo astronauts had been killed in an accident before they made it off the launchpad, and they were not the only fatalities among the elite ranks of Astronauts.

Because of the enormous risk to their lives, insurance rates were several times the astronauts’ annual salaries, making buying a policy impractical. You might think that NASA or the Federal Government would be willing to offer them a government backed policy or guaranteed death benefit, but this was not the case, as the agency was barred from purchasing life insurance for any government employees, even the Lunar crew. They would need another solution.

What they decided on was to autograph hundreds of envelopes while they sat in pre-flight quarantine. Standard practice at the time was to quarantine the crew of a mission before flight to make sure no one would get sick in space, a problem that had occurred in the past. While they waited in isolation to embark on their mission, they signed hundreds of envelopes bearing spaceflight themed artwork before putting a stamp on each one and then entrusting them to a friend. This trusted ally, another Astronaut named Tom Stafford, would then take some of these signed and stamped letters, now known as “insurance covers” to the post office near Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and have them cancelled by the post office, which would result in an official date marked on the envelope. The first batch were cancelled in Florida on July 16th, 1969, the date of the launch. Stafford then personally flew the other half of the covers to Houston in his T-38 Talon, to have them cancelled at the post office near Mission Control on July 20th, the planned date of the landing.

These artifacts of the Space Race have gone on to attain collectors’ item status, and maintain a following to this day, with examples often selling for over $5,000 at auction. While that is certainly some very expensive postage, one imagines they would have held even greater monetary value had the mission gone awry and the astronauts had not made it home safely. The express purpose of these covers was to provide a store of value in the form of collectors’ items that the men’s families could sell in the event of a disaster, hence their moniker “insurance cover”.

Fortunately, most of us will not need to resort to such measures to protect our families’ financial wellbeing, but it is an interesting chapter in the history of both our country and the insurance industry.