SPACE THEMATICS: SECOND POST

 A gift from my good friend and fellow space enthusiast Brian Berke, these wonderful soviet era stamps included more fabulous artwork, including the Sputnik 3 commemorative above and the double Cosmos stamp below.

From the same series as the Vostok stamp on the earlier post, an Explorer 1 from Poland and a Nicaragua issue showing the Early Bird intelsat,

Salyut 4 commemorative stamp with Soyuz 17 crew  Georgy Grechko and Aleksei Gubarev.

The line and etching work on many of the stamps is quite remarkable and given the size of the finished article, a huge amount of detail is included.

Republic of Congo sequence of stamps featuring the Telstar and Relay communications satellites

Once more, the veil of secrecy surrounding the early manned missions meant that depictions of the actual craft - such as Voshkod 2 - were often intentionally misleading. The Czechloslovakian stamp on the right, has a gorgeous woodcut style image of Valentina Tereshkova - the first female cosmonaut and Valery Bykovsy.

 Vladimir Komarov, Konstantin Feoktistov and Boris Yegorov

One of the stamps is almost letter sized in itself, at almost 3" long and features the Soyuz cosmonauts, including the tragically heroic Vladimir Komarov, who lost his life in the ill fated Soyuz 1 capsule.