When you buy through links in our articles, Future and its distribution partners may earn a commission.
Photos of the Moon captured by American, Russian, European, Japanese, Indian, Korean and Chinese spacecraft are the subject of new United Nations (UN) postage stamps celebrating the 55th anniversary of NASA’s Apollo 11 lunar landing mission.
The UN Postal Administration (UNPA) will release six postage stamps and three souvenir sheets on Saturday (July 20) to commemorate International Moon Day. Since 2021, the UN has recognized the day when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin I walked on the moon “to raise awareness of the commitment to sustainable lunar exploration by national and international space programs around the world.”
“Today’s lunar exploration is full of ambitious plans, but expanding our hitherto pristine horizons must occur sustainably,” said Aarti Holla-Maini, director of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, in a statement appearing on souvenir sheets. . “The United Nations will leverage its unique convening power to foster the necessary dialogue on the way forward.”
The stamps and sheets will be issued in three denominations corresponding to the UNPA offices in New York (US dollars), Geneva (Swiss francs) and Vienna (euros).
Designed by Rorie Katz with the UN, the stamps reproduce images from six different lunar missions, with three more represented on the souvenir sheets. Tenant matters include:
-
Danuri, also known as the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), South Korea’s first lunar mission launched in 2022;
-
Surveyor 1, the first in the United States soft lunar modulewhich preceded the Apollo missions in 1966;
-
Chandrayaan-3, from India first probe to land on the moon in 2023;
-
SLIM, or Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, Japan’s first spacecraft to reach the surface in 2024;
-
SMART-1, the first European Space Agency (ESA) mission to the Moon in 2003; It is
-
Chang’e-5, China’s first lunar sample return missionreleased in 2020.
The souvenir sheets further commemorate the United States’ Apollo 11 mission, which landed on July 20, 1969; the former Soviet Union’s Luna 2 robotic probe, which performed the world’s first landing on the Moon on September 14, 1959; and China’s Change’e-4, the world’s first probe to land on the far side of the Moon on January 3, 2019.
In addition to the stamps and sheets, UNPA has also designed International Moon Day pictorial postmarks (one for each office) and is offering for sale covers from the first day (sealed envelopes with the stamp of the day the stamps were issued). Tenant postage stamps are limited to 12,000 per pair; 17 thousand for the Apollo 11 souvenir sheet and 18 thousand for each of the other two sheets.
Previous UNPA space seals include a Collection of eight stamps from 2007 marking 50 years since the start of the Space Age; a 2011 launch for the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight; a pair of nebula-themed stamps from 2013 for World Space Week; a 2018 set commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first UN conference on exploration and peaceful uses of outer space; and a 2022 collection of six stamps and six souvenir sheets for Missions to Mars launched by the USA, China and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
follow collectSPACE.com about Facebook and on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Copyright 2024 collectSPACE.com. All rights reserved.
