These fascinating stamps are from Fujeira, a part of the United Arab Emirates. The artwork highlights Gemini and Apollo milestones (possibly Mercury as well, looking more closely at the capsule stamp.) The images are artistic and vividly colored. I wish I could find better pictures, or at the very least, ones without postmarks (or whatever that over-stamping in gold ink is.)
NASA Images is a great new(er) resource developed last year as a joint project between NASA and Archive.org. If you’ve been looking for a one-stop resource for everything NASA does, you just found it!
NASA Images is a service of Internet Archive ( www.archive.org ), a non-profit library, to offer public access to NASA’s images, videos and audio collections. NASA Images is constantly growing with the addition of current media from NASA as well as newly digitized media from the archives of the NASA Centers.
The goal of NASA Images is to increase our understanding of the earth, our solar system and the universe beyond in order to benefit humanity.
After Sputnik: 50 Years of the Space Age is a fantastic book, showcasing not only space artifacts but some of the items influenced by the space age as well. I can’t wait to purchase it, and many a future Themes article seed is nestled in the pages!
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first human-made object to orbit the Earth. This single act jump-started a new era in history—a broad effort to explore, learn about, survive in, utilize, and fully understand the implications of humanity’s first steps beyond Earth. As much as any other twentieth-century undertaking, the achievement of sending humans and machines into space has transformed and shaped the way we live. From Sputnik to today, from heroic first journeys to the everyday application of space technologies, spaceflight has cut a broad swath through the contemporary experience.
As time marches closer to the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch, I expect we’ll see more books of this basic theme popping up.
I have to preface this by saying that, by and large, all toys, miniatures and models of Japanese origin are awesome. Even “cheap” things (capsule toys, etc) are detailed and quality. I found this set of World Space Museum miniatures on Countdown Creations, but I’d bought one of them in a Japanese supermarket years before, and wished there were more boxes than one! (Now I have a chance to get the rest, at least, the rest of the moon-related ones. I’m particular.)
World Space Museum™ presents a series of incredibly detailed, snap-together model replicas of historical rockets, satellites, landers, and explorers first released in Japan in 2003 now available for the first time in English.
Each model comes with an explanation of the mission and trading cards. (And candy! Maybe they’re leaving the candy out of the description on purpose.) Collect them all!
All written content is © 2006-2009 Danielle Signor. Unless otherwise indicated, all photographs and images are copyright their respective sources and creators.
