page_title: David Scott
section_title: Postal covers incident
hierarchical_section_title: David Scott / NASA career / Postal covers incident
caption_attribution_description: English: An original Apollo 15 postal cover flown to the lunar surface by Dave Scott, Jim Irwin and Al Worden in 1971.
context_page_description: Col. David Randolph Scott, USAF, Ret. is a retired test pilot and NASA astronaut who was the seventh person to walk on the Moon. The commander of Apollo 15, Scott was selected as an astronaut as part of the third group in 1963. Scott flew three times in space, and is the only living commander of an Apollo mission that landed on the Moon and one of four surviving Moon walkers. Following the deaths of James Irwin in 1991 and Alfred Worden in 2020, Scott is now the last surviving crew member of Apollo 15.
  Before becoming an astronaut, Scott graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and joined the Air Force. After serving as a fighter pilot in Europe, he graduated from the Air Force Experimental Test Pilot School and the Aerospace Research Pilot School. Scott retired from the Air Force in 1975 with the rank of colonel, and more than 5,600 hours of logged flying time.
  As an astronaut, Scott made his first flight into space as pilot of the Gemini 8 mission, along with Neil Armstrong, in March 1966, spending just under eleven hours in low Earth orbit. He would have been the second American astronaut to walk in space had Gemini 8 not made an emergency abort.
context_section_description: The crew had arranged with a friend named Horst Eiermann to carry postal covers to the Moon in exchange for about $7,000 for each astronaut. Slayton had issued regulations that personal items taken in spacecraft be listed for his approval; this was not done for the covers through an error. Scott carried the covers into the CM in his spacesuit; they were transferred to the LM en route to the Moon, and landed there with the astronauts. Scott sent 100 of them to Eiermann, and in late 1971, against the astronauts' wishes, the covers were offered for sale by West German stamp dealer Hermann Sieger. The astronauts returned the money, but in April 1972, Slayton learned of the unauthorized covers, and had Scott, Worden and Irwin removed as backup crew members for Apollo 17. The matter became public in June 1972, and the astronauts were reprimanded for poor judgment by NASA and the Air Force the following month. The covers that the crew still had were initially impounded by NASA but were in 1983 returned to the astronauts in an out-of-court settlement, as the government felt it could not successfully defend the lawsuit, and that NASA either authorized the covers to be flown or was aware of them.
  The press release that announced the reprimands, dated July 11, 1972, stated that the astronauts' "actions will be given due consideration in their selection for future assignment", something that made it extremely unlikely that they would be selected to fly in space again. Newsweek reported that "there are no forthcoming missions for which he [Scott] is being considered". Scott related in his autobiography that Alan Shepard, then head of the Astronaut Office, had offered him the choice between backing up Apollo 17, and serving as a special assistant on the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, the first joint mission with the Soviet Union, and that he had chosen the latter. Although a NASA spokesman had stated that Scott had no choice but to leave the Astronaut Corps, and this was reproduced in the press, Slayton's supervisor, Christopher C. Kraft, stated that the Public Affairs Office at NASA had erred, and the transfer was not a further rebuke.
caption: One of the covers that was taken to the lunar surface
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