_edited.png)
Ignition In Three, Two, One… We’ve Got Mail: The Story of Missile Mail
- Justin Horn
- Jan 20, 2022
- 6 min read
“Mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to England, to India, or to Australia by guided missiles.” - Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield[1]
Tearing through the atmosphere at over 600 miles per hour, a guided missile headed straight for the Mayport Naval Auxiliary Air Station near Jacksonville, Florida. As the missile cruised toward the Florida coast, Navy planes gave chase and ground crews rushed to prepare for the missile’s approach. Launched from a submarine off the Atlantic coast, at the height of the Cold War, the missile would have been great cause for alarm. That is – it would have – had it been armed with a warhead. But this missile did not have a warhead. Instead, this missile was armed with the daily mail. Launched on June 8, 1959, as part of a joint US Navy and US Post Office experiment, the missile was part of a test to determine the feasibility of “Missile Mail.”
The missile mail experiment occurred during a unique time in American history. The United States was in a cultural, economic, political, scientific, and technological Cold War with the Soviet Union. The Soviet’s perceived to gain an upper hand in the scientific and technological aspect when – on October 4, 1957 – they launched Sputnik I into orbit. The Soviet satellite sparked a wave of fear in the United States and concern that the US was falling behind the Soviets. Critics of the Eisenhower administration, such as Senators John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, claimed there was a growing “missile gap” between the two superpowers. In reality, no missile gap existed between the two nations. But this knowledge was largely gained through the work of spy programs – such as the U2 spy-plane – and therefore classified.[2] In this climate, the Eisenhower administration needed a way to demonstrate to the American people the United States’ capability. Missile mail fit the bill.
The brainchild of US Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield, missile mail was part of his ongoing effort to improve and modernize the Post Office.[3] During his eight-year tenure as Postmaster, Summerfield implemented new mechanized mail processing and sorting equipment, oversaw the adoption of new mail delivery vehicles, and established the now iconic red, white, and blue color scheme of the Post Office. Always looking for ways to improve upon mail delivery, Summerfield reached out to the Secretaries of Defense and the Navy about the possibility of using their rockets as mail carriers. The military agreed to this seemingly crazy idea. After all, delivering mail was a good way of demonstrating to the public the accuracy and reliability of the military’s missiles.[4]
While the idea of using missiles to deliver the mail seems, even today, like science fiction, it was not without precedent. The New York Times reported a 1935 test delivery conducted by a group of amateur rocket enthusiasts. The delivery included “a live cock, a hen and 189 messages.”[5] The article fails to mention if the poultry survived their flight. In February 1936, another group used two rockets to transport mail about 2,000 feet from Greenwood Lake, New York to Hewitt, New Jersey. The rockets crash-landed on a frozen lake and slid along the ice. The Hewitt postmaster retrieved the two bags worth of mail dragging them the rest of the way to the Post Office.[6] Then, during WWII, the Nazis used their V-2 rockets to deliver propaganda leaflets, along with explosives, to England. By 1958, a US Army Jupiter ballistic missile fired from Cape Canaveral, Florida contained a message from Major General John B. Medaris which read, “If you get this letter, it will be the first letter delivered by missile.”[7] Further rocket mail test flights occurred in 1958 when the Rocket Research Institute sponsored the flight of six mail transport rockets. The rockets contained 1,000 covers in their tails and flew from a test range on the Nevada-California border to deliver the mail 1 ½ miles.[8] By early 1959, the Post Office began working with the Navy to conducted “unofficial” test of missile mail off the Pacific coast using the Navy’s Regulas missile. The test convinced the Post Office and Navy of the feasibility, and plans went forward for the first “official” test.
The Regulas I Guided Missile used for the official missile mail test was developed in the 1950s as a ship to shore cruise missile. The missile was barrel shaped with foldable wings. It could be guided from ground stations or from aircraft in chase. The turbojet-powered missile could carry a payload of 3,000 pounds and had a range of 500 miles. Aboard ship or submarine, the missile was rail launched from the deck and could be equipped with two strap-on JATO boosters for added power on take-off. Test missiles also had landing gear which allowed them to take-off and land on runways like regular aircraft. For the mail test, the Regulas' warhead compartment held two blue and red painted metal U.S. Mail canisters, each holding 1,500 covers.[9]
For the official missile mail test, 3,000 letters, all from Postmaster Summerfield, were created. The covers contained a 4-cent airmail stamp and a stamp indicating the letter was part of the “First Official Missile Mail” launch. The letters and Regulas missile were loaded onto the US Navy submarine USS Barbero in Norfolk, Virginia. The Barbero departed Norfolk
and sailed south. When the submarine was 100 miles off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, the letters were loaded onto the Regulas, and the missile was fired toward the Florida coast. Chase aircraft guided the missile toward Mayport Air Station, and the missile successfully lowered its landing gear and touched down less than 22 minutes after its launch. From Mayport Air Station, the letters were taken to the Jacksonville Post Office and delivered to their final destinations by conventional means. One of the letters was delivered to President Eisenhower at the Oval Office by letter carrier Nobel Upperman.[10] Summerfield, present at the delivery, noted the missile mail “symbolizes this country’s determination ‘that the scientific achievements of our people shall be used as a rich legacy of progress for mankind.’”[11]
While the June 1959 test was successful, there were obvious problems with delivering mail via missile. The Regulas needed to be guided either by a ground station, ship or submarine, or pilot in a chase plane. If there was a chase plane, why not just put the mail on that aircraft and forgo the missile? After all, the New York Times noted “missiles offer no speed advantages over manned jet planes.”[12] Summerfield himself recognized the problems but held out hope that “the guided missile might some day [sic] provide faster international mail service and improve service for isolated areas where other transportation is infrequent.”[13]
While Summerfield’s dream of missile mail never played out to the extent he envisioned, a few cases of successful mail delivery via rocket have occurred since the missile mail test. One instance was in January 1969 when Soviet cosmonauts aboard Soyuz 5 docked with and delivered private letters and other correspondence to their comrades on Soyuz 4. In July 1969, Apollo 11 carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins to the Moon. The Americans, embracing the capitalist spirit of their country, carried with them 200 autographed pieces of “Moon mail.” Operating in a more official capacity, in 1983 the Space Shuttle Challenger carried 260,000 USPS issued covers aboard STS-8. The covers were crammed into eight cans, and then sold individually to collectors for $15.35.[14]
[1] Arthur A. Summerfield, quoted in United States Postal Service, The United States Postal Service: An American History, (Office of the Historian, Government Relations and Public Policy, United States Postal Service, 2020), 113. Emphasis authors. [2] Jim Newton, Eisenhower: The White House Years (New York: Random House, 2011), 329. [3] The Postal Reorganization Act – which took effect July 1, 1971 – replaced the cabinet-level Post Office Department with the new federal agency, the United States Postal Service (USPS). [4] Nancy Pope, “Firing Letters: The 60th Anniversary of Missile Mail,” Smithsonian National Postal Museum, June 8, 2019, postalmuseum.si.edu/firing-letters-the-60th-anniversary-of-missile-mail. [5] Russell Baker, “U. S. Missile Delivers the Mail,” New York Times, June 9, 1959, timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1959/06/09/91420905.html?pageNumber=12. [6] “Missile Mail,” Office of the Historian United States Postal Service, July 2008, about.usps.com/who-we-are/postal-history/missile-mail.pdf. [7] John B. Medaris quoted in Baker, “U. S. Missile Delivers the Mail.” [8] Baker, “U. S. Missile Delivers the Mail.” [9] David K. Stumpf, Regulus: America’s Fist Nuclear Submarine Missile (Paducah, KY: Turner Publishing Co., 1996), 128. [10] Pope, “Firing Letters: The 60th Anniversary of Missile Mail.” [11] Baker, “U. S. Missile Delivers the Mail.” [12] Baker, “U. S. Missile Delivers the Mail.” [13] Arthur E. Summerfield quoted in Baker, “U. S. Missile Delivers the Mail.” [14] “You’ve Got Rocketmail,” Retro Future, accessed January 18, 2022, web.archive.org/web/20080916123628/http://www.retrofuture.com/rocketmail.html; and “Space Shuttle Mission Archives, STS-8,” NASA, accessed January 18, 2022, www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/archives/sts-8.html.
Comments