United States Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield utilized a Navy cruise missile submarine in 1959 to fire a nuclear-capable Regulus missile loaded with three thousand letters directly at a naval station in Florida.

A closer look

United States Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield utilized a Navy cruise missile submarine in 1959 to fire a nuclear-capable Regulus missile loaded with three thousand letters directly at a naval station in Florida. Aiming to completely revolutionize the speed of long-distance communication, the payload detached and parachuted safely to the ground, successfully delivering mail from a vessel stationed off the coast of Virginia in less than twenty-two minutes. Summerfield boldly declared that before man reached the moon, mail would routinely be delivered by guided missiles, which is absolutely hilarious in retrospect. Instead of implementing a totally rad intercontinental ballistic postal service that rained postcards from the stratosphere, bureaucrats eventually abandoned the project due to exorbitant costs, abandoning us to the harsh reality of relying on painfully slow delivery trucks that still manage to lose our packages