A century ago, children and adults alike dreamed of exotic, far-off lands – fantasies evoked merely by glancing at foreign stamps on an envelope mailed from overseas. The endless miles that envelope traveled let imaginations soar. Such distant places seemed impossibly magical.
Fast-forward to the 1960s. Mail had become a daily commodity and international travel was fast becoming so. That’s when we began looking up with different dreams. In 1962, John Glenn orbited the earth. We, and the world, were amazed. A scant seven years later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. We, and the world, were apoplectic. More missions would follow....
Save for the Space Shuttle, the magic of human space travel may have peaked in the late 1970s. We’ve since shot countless unmanned space probes, satellites and other projectiles skyward as have Russia, China and others. Consequently, the cosmos has become littered with debris – so much so that countries now must calculate exactly where they launch something to avoid it being hit and destroyed by an errant discarded rocket panel, screw or wrench.
On a clear night, if you look up at just the right time and place, you can see the International Space Station soaring by. It’s a bright white light that could be mistaken for a plane. It’s not. Planes fly at around 30,000 feet at 600 miles per hour. The Space Station flies 250 miles above the earth (1.3 million feet) at 17,500 mile per hour. It circles the globe once every 90 minutes.
A little higher up is the Hubble telescope at 332 miles. It also travels at 17,000 mph.
Eclipsing everything is the Webb Space Telescope, far and away (pun intended), the most complex astronomical device ever deployed. Sent up on Christmas Day 2021, it was launched from French Guiana. The location was chosen because being near the earth’s equator gave extra gravitational momentum to slingshot the rocket aloft.
That launch site helped propel the telescope into an orbit around our sun, a little over one million miles away. On its journey, the rocket flew at 30,000 miles per hour. For reference, think of something nine miles away. The Webb rocket traveled that distance in eight seconds.
Inconceivable as this would have been 100 years ago, the photos the Webb is sending back to earth, are far more incredible. Pointed far out into space, the telescope is able to peer at light from galaxies that has traveled through space for over 13 billion years. The Webb is able to do that because of its hyper-sensitivity. It is so sensitive it can detect the heat displacement of something as small as a bumblebee 250,000 miles away. It can also discern minute details on something as small as a penny at a distance of 25 miles.
The telescope’s precision is due to its mirrors the size of a tennis court coated in pure gold. Because a micro-coating is all that’s needed, each of the 18 mirrors contains a layer of gold 1,000 thinner than a strand of human hair.
To celebrate the activation and success of the world’s most powerful telescope and largest manmade space object, the USPS has issued a commemorative First-Class “Forever” stamp featuring the Webb telescope.
The stamp depicts a rich image of the space station against a galactic starscape with its 18 gold-coated mirror segments pointed outward. In front, supported by three struts, is a secondary mirror over the solar shield essential in the minus-350-degree temperature in space. This image, with planet earth distantly visible in the far background, shows the telescope in a position to confirm the perfect alignment of its mirrors. Additional stars and galaxies appear in the distance.
Along the stamp’s bottom edge are the words “Webb Space Telescope” with “USA/FOREVER” on the left side. The stamp is now available for postal patrons and collectors at post offices nationwide.
The design of the telescope on a stamp with our small home planet far in the background offers a telling correlation and another chance to dream. After all, a century ago, in 1922, it would have taken weeks for a letter on earth to travel to the US from overseas. This instant, a full-color image from the Webb telescope is being sent one million miles to earth in just five seconds. By any definition that’s impossibly magical. Now…imagine what the next century will bring by 2122.
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