Gagarin's experience that day was not unique. The first flyer reportedly signed hundreds, if not thousands of autographs for adoring fans between his return to Earth and his untimely death seven years later. The desire to own a personal "connection" with the first human to fly into space was extended by the public to the 399 men and woman who followed Gagarin, if sometimes only to a slightly lesser extent. The requests, though, did not end with those for a signature.

When the Soviet Union and United States began competing for control of space during the late 1950s, their approach to memorabilia started from opposite ends of the spectrum and met somewhere near the middle. Whereas initially the Soviet Union retained tight control of their work product, the United States embraced a much looser approach.

Take, for example, the two countries' first manned space flights. When Gagarin's Vostok capsule was recovered, the idea of a Soviet engineer removing a segment of the spacecraft for his personal collection would have been unthinkable. (Such an action would have been met with serious discipline and quite possibly imprisonment.)

On the other side of the Atlantic, however, this scenario was not only possible, it was encouraged. Harold French, a NASA telemetry technician, described in a letter to a collector years later how the parachute for Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 was hung in a hanger bay where he worked for several days. Those involved with Project Mercury, including French, were given permission to lower the parachute and cut off sections as a souvenir.

The U.S. approach to allowing memorabilia to be saved from each flight extended well into the 1960s and the Apollo lunar program. Not only were engineers allowed to save small fragments of heat shield and parachute material, but the astronauts were also allowed to carry personal items along for the trip. Obtaining memorabilia was not as difficult a proposition as it might seem. It only required that you know someone who worked directly on the various projects, or even one of the hundreds of thousands of workers across the nation who supported the space program.

All that changed however, after the flight of Apollo 15.

Stowed aboard the fourth U.S. Moon landing were 100 autographed and postmarked envelopes ("covers") belonging to a German stamp dealer. Disregarding the requests of the crew to wait until after the Apollo program was completed, the dealer proceeded with his sale, receiving a reported $1,500 per cover. When what had transpired reached the United States, a congressional investigation ensued and the Apollo 15 crew was taken off flight assignments.