Rocket Mail - Occurrences in Popular Culture

Occurrences in Popular Culture

During the mid-1950s, "amateur" rocketeers flew a number of zinc dust / sulfur "micrograin" solid propellant mail-carrying rockets interstate, from California, across the Colorado River, and into Arizona. The postal covers were printed for each occasion, and franked at the nearest destination post office.

Mail is delivered by rocket in an early chapter of Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. Specifically, Roger Mexico receives orders from A.C.H.T.U.N.G. this way.

A surplus mail rocket is used to reach the moon in Rocket Ship Galileo.

Ethan Hunt's computerized sunglasses (for a mission briefing) are delivered by a missile with a ground-piercing spike on the nose, fired from a shoulder-mounted tube, at the start of the John Woo film Mission: Impossible II.

Bill Bryson mentions missile mail in his 2006 memoir The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.

RocketMail was the name for one of the first major, free webmail services. For a brief time, RocketMail battled with Hotmail for the number-one spot among free webmail services. Yahoo! acquired RocketMail in 1997, and assimilated it into Yahoo! Mail, which is essentially the old RocketMail Webmail system.

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