Tens of thousands of postcards fly onboard New Shepard Mission NS-13

Today, we were inspired watching the 13th New Shepard mission (NS-13) from Blue Origin’s West Texas Launch Site. New Shepard carried a dozen payloads to space including an experiment from NASA to test precision landing technologies for future missions to the Moon. The mission also carried tens of thousands of postcards collected from classrooms around the world and through organizations including STEM2 Hub, Challenger Center, Space Camp, The Museum of Flight, and our friends at Cedarhurst Elementary School in Burien, Washington’s Highline School District. All postcards will be returned to students with a ‘Flown to Space’ stamp.

Now that the postcards have flown to space and back, we’re excited to return them to Cedarhurst students, as well as a large batch of Moon-themed postcards to students in Florida as part of our ‘Dream Big Florida’ program with STEM2 Hub.

In addition to postcards, nearly 1.2 million tomato seeds on behalf of Tomatosphere, a project run by Let’s Talk Science and First the Seed Foundation, also spent time in zero gravity onboard New Shepard. The seeds will be distributed to more than 15,000 classrooms around the U.S. and Canada for students to study the effects of space on food to support future human space travel.

Join the fun! Send us your ideas on a postcard answering the question, “Why do you think Earth needs space?” Send them to Club for the Future and Blue Origin will fly them to space on a future New Shepard flight. Visit our postcards page for instructions.