US Postal Service Celebrates Star Trek’s 50th Anniversary (and Other Space-Related Stuff) With New Stamps
2016 is going to a big year for Trekkies, as it’s the 50th Anniversary year of their beloved franchise. With Star Trek turning fifty, we’ve got Star Trek Beyond coming out in July and Creation Entertainment’s Star Trek 50 Convention in Las Vegas in August to look forward to, as well as countless other celebrations worldwide. Now, the US Postal Service is doing what it does best when it comes to celebrating anything: releasing commemorative stamps.
Check out the beautifully designed stamps above! They were designed by a company called The Heads of State, under the art direction of Antonio Alcalá, and beautifully capture elements from the Original Series with 1960s-inspired design. Here’s how the USPS describes them:
- the Starship Enterprise inside the outline of a Starfleet insignia against a gold background;
- the silhouette of a crewman in a transporter against a red background;
- the silhouette of the Enterprise from above against a green background; and,
- the Enterprise inside the outline of the Vulcan statue (Spock’s iconic hand gesture) against a blue background
The words “SPACE… THE FINAL FRONTIER,” from Captain Kirk’s famous voice-over appear beneath the stamps against a background of stars.
I’ll be picking up several books of those when they come out. (Yes, I still actually put things in the mail, and even if I didn’t, I’d find a reason to just to use these!)
Also of interest to you nerds are their 2016 “Views of Our Planets” stamps, which feature Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune showing both the planets’ “true color”—what we might see if traveling through space—as well as using colors to represent and visualize certain features of a planet based in imaging data, or to show things that cannot be seen by the human eye.
But don’t worry about Pluto. Pluto gets its own stamp this year called “Pluto—Explored!” in celebration of NASA’s exploration of Pluto with the New Horizons spacecraft. What’s really cool is that a 1991 stamp that was called “Pluto—Not Yet Explored!”, which was created as a rallying cry for us to get our asses out there, was placed on New Horizons in 2006, so this new stamp totally brings our journey with Pluto full circle by honoring NASA’s achievement with the New Horizons project.
Look, I know we’re all trying to go green and save paper and whatnot (also, you may have forgotten how to write longhand, what with all the texting and typing you do), but there’s still nothing quite like getting a card, letter, or note from someone awesome in the mail. Make 2016 the year you reach out to those you care about with something handwritten!
(via Newsarama)
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