#4527-4528 Mercury Project and Messenger Mission Postage Stamps
On May 4, 2011, in Kennedy Space Center, Florida, the Postal Service™ issued a Mercury Project/MESSENGER Mission se-tenant pair commemorative stamp (Forever® priced at 44 cents), in two designs in a pressure-sensitive adhesive (PSA) pane of 20 stamps.
One stamp commemorates the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Project Mercury, America's first manned spaceflight program, and NASA astronaut Alan Shepard's historic flight on May 5, 1961, aboard the spacecraft Freedom 7.
The other stamp draws attention to NASA's unmanned MESSENGER mission, a scientific investigation of the planet Mercury. On March 17, 2011, MESSENGER became the first spacecraft to enter into orbit around Mercury.
These two historic missions—Shepard's Mercury flight and MESSENGER's orbit of Mercury—frame a remarkable fifty-year period in which America has advanced space exploration through more than 1,500 manned and unmanned flights.
The Mercury Project stamp depicts Alan Shepard, the Mercury capsule Freedom 7, and the Redstone launching rocket. The MESSENGER Mission stamp depicts the MESSENGER spacecraft in orbit around the planet Mercury.
A three-time winner of the Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist, Donato Giancola of Brooklyn, New York, illustrated the Mercury Project/MESSENGER Mission stamps under the direction of Phil Jordan.
