How Did Astronauts Of The 60s "Purchase" Life Insurance?

See Neil Armstrong Couldn't Afford Life Insurance, So He Used a Creative Way to Provide for His Family If He Died. Excerpts:

"Back then astronaut captains made about $17,000 a year, NPR reports and a life insurance policy for Neil Armstrong would have run about $50,000 a year, or more than $300,000 in 2012 dollars."

So how did they "buy" insruance?

"It happened like this:

Because some guys from the prior Apollo missions had gotten colds and mild bouts of queasiness on their trips, NASA had implemented a quarantine procedure before liftoffs.

So about a month before they were set to go to the moon, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin were locked into a Plexiglas room together and got busy providing for their families the only way they could — they signed hundreds of autographs.

In what would become a common practice, the guys signed their names on envelopes emblazoned with various space-related images. The 'covers' would, of course, become intensely valuable should the trio perish on the mission. They're now often referred to as " Apollo Insurance Covers."

And to ensure the covers would hold maximum value, the crew put stamps on them, and sent them in a package to a friend, who dumped them all in the mail so they would be postmarked July 16, 1969 — the day of the mission's success — or its failure."