Talk about going postal! On June 8, 1959, a missile carrying 3,000 letters was launched (yes, you read it right) by the U.S. Postal Service.

A nuclear weapon fired from a submarine to deliver mail? Sound like a joke out of Dr. Strangelove? Well, it wasn't. Some people truly believed the age of rocket-delivered mail had begun.

The letter-carrying missile, whose payload included a letter from President Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower, blasted off from the Navy submarine Barbero and landed safely, radiation-free, at a U.S. Naval Station in Mayport, FL. 

Postmaster General Arthur E. Summerfield declared the experiment a success. "Before man reaches the moon, mail will be delivered within hours from New York to California, to Britain, to India or Australia by guided missiles," Summerfield told the New York Times.

The 1959 "missile mail"  experiment employed a state-of-the-art guidance system, capable of accurately delivering a 2800 kiloton thermonuclear weapon from 600 miles away. 

Which is one heck of way of sending out a late Mother's Day card. But there was a kind of twisted Cold War logic to the idea-similar to the phenomenon of people building bomb shelters in their backyards. "Peaceful war technology" was coming into people's daily lives in new and unexpected ways.

The Postmaster General Summerfield was confident about missile mail. "You can be certain, the Post Office department will continue to cooperate with the Defense Department on these objectives," he told the New York Times.

Whatever misgivings might have existed about firing off a guided missile to deliver mail were probably outweighed by Ike's participation. After all, President Eisenhower was known as the watchdog of "military industrial complex." Today, Ike's cover (as postmarked letters are known to collectors) would fetch top dollar on the collector's market.

Astrophilatetic enthusiasts pay substantial sums for the original souvenir covers. Each bears a 4-cent stamp with a picture of a Regulus rocket and the caption "first official missile mail." Since the Post Office dropped plans to use rocket mail, they are particularly valuable.

A different kind rocket mail later emerged. In 1969, the "science" got a boost when Russian cosmonauts arriving on the Soyuz 5 delivered private letters and other correspondence to their comrades on Soyuz 4. 

It turns out American astronauts also exercised a little side business in this kind of rocket mail, including covers among their personal items and later autographing them for collectors. Over 200 pieces of "moon mail" were carried aboard Apollo 11 and then returned to Earth for this purpose.

As for sanctioned rocket mail, the only "official" NASA covers were flown on Challenger flight (STS-8) in 1983. Originally issued by the U.S. Post Office for the price of $15.35, they included cancellations by the Kennedy Space Center. 260,000 were produced.

Although privately-funded rocket mail experiments continue to this day dreams of pushing the envelope by the Post Office have not materialized. Express delivery is one thing, rocket mail, well, that's something else.