The post office got a bad rap during COVID, but I’m not sure too many people want their mail delivered by rocket. Regardless, it seemed like a good idea to Heinrich von Kleist who was going to use fixed artillery batteries to fire letter-filled shells to speed up delivery of the mail. This was in the 19th century, so maybe he could be forgiven for thinking it would work, but the idea didn’t go away and in the 1950s Willy Ley looked at the possibility of using cruise missiles for the same purpose. I’m sure no-one in the 1950s, having just come out of a world war, would have objected to cruise missiles full of mail raining down on them.
In fact German rocketeer (and entrepreneur, apparently) Gerhard Zucker had already identified a need for this type of service in remote parts of Scotland, where some islands were only accessible by boat and regular mail deliveries were not a thing. In 1934, he loaded up about 1,200 pieces of mail into a rocket intending to let fly from a small island called Scarp to some other small Scottish island. There was quite a crowd for the occasion, including media, but unfortunately for all concerned the rocket exploded seconds after ignition.
That element of danger and uncertainty in mail delivery certainly didn’t act as a deterrent though, with the USS Barbero (a submarine) firing a cruise missile with about 3,000 pieces of mail toward the Naval Station Mayport in the US in 1959. By all accounts this was a complete success as the mail was sorted and delivered as usual (with no record of any deaths having occurred as a result of the cruise missile strike). So many questions though. Including whether we could repurpose some aging Collins-class submarines.
There’s a theory that if reusable rockets had of been a thing back then, we might still have rocket mail today. Of course there are other reusable airborne mail delivery systems (like, I don’t know, airplanes), but hey, rockets are cool. History though has recorded that the idea never really got going, maybe because of the cost, or the risk, or the fact it was just a dumb idea.
TL;DR – delivering mail by rocket is stupid
