Individual insurability of astronauts
The historical difficulty of obtaining commercial life insurance for an astronaut, given the market's lack of appetite for a risk deemed uncalculable, which pushed early crews to improvise their own substitute.
The individual insurability of astronauts posed a problem the commercial market long failed to solve from the earliest days of human spaceflight: no insurer held any actuarial data to price a mortality risk as extreme and as novel as an orbital mission. Astronauts on the Mercury, then Gemini and Apollo programs were therefore practically unable to buy ordinary life insurance at a rate their families could afford, since NASA at the time provided no death benefit comparable to that of a service member on operations. With no market available, several crews improvised a private substitute, pre-signing hundreds of dated postal covers that their families could sell to collectors if they died on a mission, to make up for the absence of any insured capital. This workaround illustrates a structural limit of individual insurability when facing a new risk with no claims history: the market only closed this gap as commercial spaceflight matured, with modern life insurers now treating orbital flight as a priceable exclusion rather than an uninsurable risk.
Before the launch of Apollo 11 on July 16, 1969, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins signed several hundred dated commemorative envelopes, meant to be sold by their families to stamp collectors in the event of death during the mission, for lack of any accessible commercial life insurance.
astronaut insurance, astronaut life cover, Apollo insurance covers
Follow the research
One letter a week. First, the week's underwriting note, when one is published: a dated, argued decision, signed by Paul Bernardski. Then what the observatory published on cyber risk, political risk and insurance. No account, no tracking.
No spam, one-click unsubscribe, no data ever sold.