I remember a scene from a movie about the early days of the space program, most likely about the Apollo missions, that featured briefly the Apollo 15 astronauts and focused on the fallout over the postal cover scandal (they took postal covers up with them to sell later).
I was sure this was HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon, but their Apollo 15 episode focuses on other, more positive parts of the mission.
Some details:
- I’m 99% sure it was dramatized, but it may have been one of those half-dramatized documentaries.
- It seemed to be in the same vein as The Right Stuff and From the Earth to the Moon. Perhaps a little less prestige and more low budget.
- It featured a scene of the Astronauts looking sheepish at a very minimal celebration, showing that their received much less attention than the other crews as a result of the scandal.
- It was probably made in the 90s or 00s.
Well, I figured out what happened here.
In The Right Stuff, Gus Grissom gets a very muted welcome after it looks like he blew the hatch of his landing capsule (thus sinking it). However, adding to the embarrassment (in the movie) is the fact that he comes back with loads of toy space capsules and rolls of pennies which he took up there to impress people with later.
This must have become conflated in my mind with reading about the postal cover scandal.
Sounds Solved. We all have memories that are only partly trustworthy. Glad you figured it out.