Where no one had gone before..

Today is the 50th Anniversary of the landing of ‘The Eagle’ on the moon and I, for one, am very happy that it is being celebrated. Check out NASA’s site to get a feel or remind yourself..

Being of a certain age, space exploration and a certain hopefulness about it (unity of all mankind, does anyone remember?) were definitely part of my childhood.

The original series was the best (imho)!
inside cover
Loved the “beaming” – and believed it would happen in reality soon

Little me collected stamps, too.., so here are a few for your kind consideration:

From a 1963 set of Russian and American Spacecrafts
Left: Konstanty Ciolkowski’s formula which appeared in his 1903 (!) publication: “Exploration of Outer Space by Means of Rocket Devices”. It proved for the first time that a rocket could perform space flight.
Right: Explorer 1 (first satellite launched by the United States, part of the U.S. participation in the International Geophysical Year – 1958.) 
On Oct. 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 successfully launched and entered Earth’s orbit. The successful launch gave the then Soviet Union the distinction of putting the first human-made object into space. The word ‘Sputnik’ originally meant ‘fellow traveler,’ but has become synonymous with ‘satellite’ in modern Russian.
1959: Luna 2 was the sixth of the Soviet Union’s Luna programme spacecraft launched to the Moon.
Commemorating the world’s first joint space flight (1962) – Soviet spacecrafts Vostok 3 and Vostok 4 . Cosmonauts: Andrian Grigoryevich Nikolayev
and Pavel Romanovich Popovich.
Valery Bykovsky and Vostok 5 – 1963
Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova (the 1st woman in space!) and Vostok 6 – 1963
Lunokhod (Moonwalker) 1 was the first roving remote-controlled robot to land on another world (on the moon, in 1970)
Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, 1975 (U.S.A. and Soviet Union cooperation)
Interplanetary Probes, ca. 1975 (sorry that’s all I know about this one)

I leave you with my favourite version of an appropriate song – enjoy! (Warning: it’s from 1985…)

5 Comments

  1. Happy 50th moon landing! That Star Trek book is cool, but it’s the space stamps I love the most and you have some wonderful examples there. Like you I was captivated as a kid by space travel. I have a small collection of space stamps that I hope to add to eventually. I still have my 80s Stanley Gibbons album, but its the space stamps I like the most from it. Thanks for sharing 🙂

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