
When I first laid eyes on that ridiculous sausage-pile of a spaceship, I naturally thought that it was yet another Cold War Deception stamp.
Et tu, petard, et tu ?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luna_16 ... deWiki thinks that the spaceship is real, and that the mission actually happened
https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-a...3063170.html ... a convincing stock photo of the spaceship in its lab, dated 1971, though the launch was in 1970
https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/...posite-image ... a "composite" image, which was how we pronounced the word "photoshopped" back in the day
The stamp, of course, is utterly real ...
Country: Soviet Union, USSR
Series: Soviet Automatic Station "Luna-16"
Catalog codes:
Michel SU 3838
Stamp Number SU 3798
Yvert et Tellier SU 3687
Stanley Gibbons SU 3885
Issued on: 1970-12-28
Size: 28 x 40 mm
Colors: Dark grey blue
Perforation: comb11˝
Printing: Photogravure
Face value: 10 Russian kopek
Print run: 4,000,000
... as is the 19710522 postmark at Kievsky (railway station) (sorting site in Moscow) ... Thanks, Alexey !
The addressee was a US Army non-com (WW2), and a founding member and Treasurer / Secty-Treas (1952-1991) of the Korea Stamp Society.
Cheers,
/s/ ikeyPikey
