Life Insurance for Apollo 11 Astronauts

Say you’re an insurance agent. One of the astronauts from the upcoming Apollo 11 mission strolls into your office with a tough question: “Do you consider being signed up to travel in a rocket to the moon a preexisting condition?”

It’s easy to forget that the Apollo astronauts were actually federal employees, and the General Schedule pay scale isn’t often described as excessive. Most of the men going on these missions were captains, which requires a good deal of formal education, training, and incredible amounts of risk, and yet the pay for captains in 1969 was only $17,000₁. Of course, that money would go a lot further back then, but unfortunately not far enough to cover the cost of a life insurance policy. According to a story by NPR run in 2012₂, a life insurance policy for Neil Armstrong would have run about $50,000 a year, or more than $330,000 in 2017 dollars. Luckily for Neil Armstrong and the rest of the Apollo 11 astronauts, even though their pay wasn’t commensurate, they happened to be famous. People wanted their autographs, and were willing to pay for them.

For the astronauts it was basic economics: their signatures were in demand, and they were the only ones who could supply them. The big ticket item in the autograph world was something called a cover. A cover is a signed envelope that is postmarked on a certain date, rooting it in time forever. Before the mission, the astronauts had to spend time in quarantine, and the perfect way to pass the time ended up being signing hundreds of these covers. They handed them over with specific instructions for the covers to be postmarked on specific dates, the day they launched, the day they were supposed to make it to the moon, and then distribute to the families of the astronauts. They made their own form of life insurance. If something went wrong with the mission, the families could sell the covers and have enough money for their needs to be taken care of, and to send their kids to college. Either way they were going to be valuable, the first people to the moon and back, or the first people to die on the moon.

Of course we all know that the story had the happier ending. The covers became famous in collector circles. They became known as the “Apollo Insurance Covers,” and can still be purchased. The prices range from a few hundred dollars for covers from later Apollo missions, to tens of thousands of dollars for the original Apollo 11 covers. It might sound like a steep price, but it’s cheaper than a life insurance policy for an astronaut.