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 commemorating the 55th anniversary of the NASA's Apollo 11 lunar landing mission.
The UN Postal Administration (UNPA) will release six se-tenant postage stamps and three souvenir sheets on Saturday (July 20) to celebrate International Moon Day. Since 2021, the UN has recognized the day that astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon "to raise awareness about the commitment to sustainable lunar exploration on the part of national and international space programs worldwide."
"Today's moon exploration is wreathed with ambitious plans but the expansion of our so-far pristine horizons must take place sustainably," said Aarti Holla-Maini, director of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, in a statement that appears on the 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 with the UNPA offices in New York (U.S. dollars), Geneva (Swiss francs) and Vienna (euros).
Designed by Rorie Katz with the UN, the stamps reproduce imagery from six different moon missions, with three more represented on the souvenir sheets. The se-tenants' subjects include:
- Danuri, also known as the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter (KPLO), South Korea's first moon mission launched in 2022;
- Surveyor 1, the United States' first soft lunar lander, which preceded the Apollo missions in 1966;
- Chandrayaan-3, India's 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 European Space Agency's (ESA) first mission to the moon in 2003; and
- Chang'e-5, China's first lunar sample-return mission, launched 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 achieved the world's first moon landing on Sep. 14, 1959; and China's Change'e-4, the world's first probe to touch down on the far side of the moon on Jan. 3, 2019.
In addition to the stamps and sheets, the UNPA has also designed pictorial International Moon Day postmarks (one for each office) and are offering for sale first day covers (stamped envelopes postmarked for the day the stamps are issued). The se-tenant postage stamps are limited to 12,000 per pair; 17,000 for the Apollo 11 souvenir sheet and 18,000 for each of the other two sheets.
Previous UNPA space stamps include a 2007 collection of eight stamps marking 50 years since the start of the Space Age; a 2011 release for the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight; a 2013 pair of nebula-theme stamps for World Space Week; a 2018 set commemorating the 50th anniversary of the first UN conference on the exploration and peaceful uses of outer space; and a 2022 collection of six stamps and six souvenir sheets for Mars missions launched by the U.S., China and United Arab Emirates (UAE).
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