Two new U.S. postage stamps commemorating 50 years of manned space flight will be unveiled at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, May 4, during a special event hosted by the Postal History Foundation, 920 N. First Ave. in Tucson.
The special ceremony will be highlighted by remarks from Dr. Ann Sprague, a University of Arizona research scientist who is a member of the NASA science team involved with evaluating information currently being gathered about the planet Mercury from the unmanned MESSENGER spacecraft shown on one of the two new postage stamps. MESSENGER is conducting the first orbital study of our solar system’s innermost planet.
The second stamp salutes the 50th anniversary of Project Mercury, NASA’s first manned spaceflight program, and astronaut Alan Shepard’s historic May 5, 1961, flight aboard the Freedom 7 spacecraft.
An unveiling ceremony for the new commemorative postage stamps will begin at 10 a.m. with remarks from Sprague, Tucson Postmaster Carl Grigel and Armando Bras, a space memorabilia collector from Phoenix. Bras is lending many items from his collection of vintage toys, books, magazines and posters celebrating our nation’s journeys into the heavens.
Items from the UA Lunar and Planetary Laboratory’s collection of space mission artifacts and maps will also be on exhibit at the Postal History Foundation’s Peggy Slusser Memorial Philatelic Library starting May 4, running through the end of the month. These rarely-seen items include a giant 3-D map based on photographs taken of Mercury, and a globe detailing Mercury’s geographic features, as known prior to the start of the MESSENGER’s launch.
A special pictorial Tucson postmark will be applied to envelopes and cards bearing the new stamps in celebration of the stamps’ release. The stamps and postmarked items will be offered for sale at the Postal History Foundation’s postal station.
# # #
Please Note: For broadcast quality video and audio, photo stills and other media resources, visit the USPS Newsroom at www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/welcome.htm.
A self-supporting government enterprise, the U.S. Postal Service is the only delivery service that reaches every address in the nation, 150 million residences, businesses and Post Office Boxes. The Postal Service receives no tax dollars for operating expenses, and relies on the sale of postage, products and services to fund its operations. With 32,000 retail locations and the most frequently visited website in the federal government, usps.com, the Postal Service has annual revenue of more than $67 billion and delivers nearly 40 percent of the world’s mail. If it were a private sector company, the U.S. Postal Service would rank 29th in the 2010 Fortune 500. Black Enterprise and Hispanic Business magazines ranked the Postal Service as a leader in workforce diversity. The Postal Service has been named the Most Trusted Government Agency six consecutive years and the sixth Most Trusted Business in the nation by the Ponemon Institute.
