A cruise missile delivered the mail in 1959 and never again

2026. The Smithsonian National Postal Museum, in Washington, keeps an envelope bearing the strangest postmark the United States postal service has ever struck: USS BARBERO, 8 June 1959, and below it, in capitals, FIRST OFFICIAL MISSILE MAIL. Beside it stands one of the two metal containers that carried it inside. It is the first and last time a country's mail travelled in a cruise missile.

1969. Neil Armstrong steps onto the Moon ten years and one month after that postmark, and the man who had signed those 3,000 letters, still alive to see it at seventy, loses his bet. By then the Regulus had been out of service for five years and a letter from New York to California was still going by plane.

8 June 1959, shortly after noon, Naval Auxiliary Air Station Mayport, near Jacksonville, Florida. The Postmaster General, Arthur E. Summerfield, pulls the two containers out of the nose of the missile that has just landed, in front of the photographers. Inside are 3,000 identical letters, signed by him, addressed to President Eisenhower, to Vice-President Nixon, to members of Congress, to state governors and to the postal chiefs of other countries. All 3,000 say the same thing: that they arrived in a missile. And right there, with the containers still in his hands, Summerfield delivers the sentence that will outlive the Regulus and the Barbero itself: «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».

Twenty-two minutes earlier. The submarine USS Barbero, surfaced about a hundred miles off the coast of Florida, fires a Regulus I. It is a navy cruise missile designed to carry a nuclear warhead to a Soviet city.

Days earlier, in Norfolk, Virginia. Navy technicians take the warhead out of the missile and fit the two mail containers into its space. It is the only place in a Regulus where 3,000 envelopes will fit.

23 February 1936, twenty-three years before all of this, Greenwood Lake, New York State. The first American rocket mail flight on record, and this one with no ceremony at all: two rockets loaded with mailbags leave from the ice heading for the New Jersey shore, some six hundred metres away. Both crash before arriving and skid across the frozen lake. An employee goes out after them, pulls the bags out of the wreckage and covers the missing stretch on foot, dragging them.