Canada released two postage stamps on 27th June to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the famed Apollo 11 mission. Both the stamps are aligned in the opposite direction. The upside down stamp on the top features the Apollo 11 command and service modules and Earth. The one at the bottom features lunar lander Eagle approaching moon. Both the stamps feature the texts “Apollo 11 1969-2019”, CANADA, and “P” within a maple leaf emblem denoting permanent-rate stamps.

The stamps were designed by Matthew Clark of Subplot Design Inc. from Vancouver and they were printed by Lowe-Martin in a booklet of 10 stamps as five pairs, and in a pane of six stamps as three pairs. 240,000 booklets of 10; 40,000 panes of six; and 7,000 FDCs have been printed by six-colour offset lithography. They also feature hidden images of the moon and stars which can only be seen under ultraviolet light.

Canadian engineers from NASA named James Chamberlin (1915-81) and Owen Maynard (1924-2000) had worked with NASA on this mission, and a company named Heroux-Devtek from Longueuil, Que, had built a part of the lunar lander. The official first-day cover cancelled at Longueuil features the engineers on the front and their biographies behind.

Chamberlin was the one who identified that it wouldn’t be wise to fly directly to the moon. He suggested that a smaller landing module will travel to lunar orbit attached to the main spacecraft, then land on the moon’s surface and later reconnect with the main spacecraft. This became the fundamental idea behind the Apollo Program. Maynard also worked on the safest options to reach and land on the moon. He created the early designs of the main Apollo command module and the lunar lander. He also planned several missions before the Apollo 11. Founded in 1942, Heroux-Devtek manufactured the landing gear legs for the Eagle lunar module in 1969, which still remain on the moon. The light-weight aluminium legs were made using a compressible honeycomb design.

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Image Courtesy: Canada Post