US Postal Service celebrates 'Star Trek' and space with new stamps
Send your mail to the final frontier with stamps honoring the 50th anniversary of "Star Trek," as well as featuring our own planets, NASA's New Horizons mission and the moon.
If you still like to send letters the old-fashioned way, and show off your geeky side, the US Postal Service has a new set of stamps coming out in 2016 to satisfy your inner Trekkie.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the 1966 television premiere of "Star Trek," the US Postal Service announced plans to release four new Forever stamps (which cost 49 cents each in America, roughly converting to £0.33 in the UK or AU$0.65 down under).
The new stamps include retro illustrations of classic "Star Trek" iconography: a crewman in a transporter, the Starfleet insignia, the Starship Enterprise and Spock's famous Vulcan salute.
The backgrounds of the stamps use blue, yellow, green and red, the colors of Starfleet uniforms.
Design firm Heads of State designed the stamps under the art direction of Antonio Alcalá.
If you prefer the exploration of real-life space, the postal service also announced "Views of Our Planets" stamps, with eight new colorful Forever stamps featuring Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
No need to hop into the Enterprise to see our own solar system. You can simply pick up some of these vivid planet stamps, due this year.
The post office also plans on releasing "Pluto Explored!" stamps to commemorate not only Pluto but NASA's New Horizons mission as well.
"The New Horizons project is proud to have such an important honor from the US Postal Service," Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator, said in statement issued by NASA.
"Since the early 1990s, the old 'Pluto Not Explored' stamp served as a rallying cry for many who wanted to mount this historic mission of space exploration," Stern added. "Now that NASA's New Horizons has accomplished that goal, it's a wonderful feeling to see these new stamps join others commemorating first explorations of the planets."
The moon also gets a beautiful set of round stamps. At $1.20 (roughly £0.80 or AU$1.60), this Global Forever stamp can be used to mail a one ounce letter to any country where first-class mail international service is available.