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It’s been said that a penny doesn’t go a long way these days, and NASA has now added its two cents.
Two pennies were launched on Sunday (August 4) for a mission that will take millions of miles to the International Space Station (ISS). The US one-cent coins were launched aboard Northrop Grumman’s 21st Cygnus cargo spacecraft, the “SS Francis R. ‘Dick’ Scobee”, named in memory of the fallen commander of NASA’s space shuttle Challenger.
Sent into the sky aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, the two pennies were a rare gift added to the uncrewed capsule’s 8,200 pounds (3,720 kilograms) cargo weight.
“The pennies will be used in a demonstration called the ‘Screaming Balloon,'” Michele Hooks, education project manager for NASA’s Office of STEM Engagement, said in an interview with collectSPACE.com. “A penny will be placed in an uninflated balloon, and then an astronaut will inflate the balloon and spin it to compare it to a hexagon nut spinning inside a second balloon.”
“STEMonstration” is the latest in a series of short educational videos shot on the space station aimed at engaging elementary school children in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). Each STEMonstration is designed so students can recreate the experiment in their classrooms, which is why pennies are used.
“We wanted something simple that students could access and that was affordable,” Hooks said.
Relating to: Facts about Northrop Grumman’s cargo ship Cygnus
Search for cents
Pennies are actually pretty easy to find if you’re happy with a random dime. For the coins currently in space, Hooks and his team were a little more selective.
“We wanted pennies minted in 2024 to commemorate the year they were sent into space and the year the astronauts were on the station. We also wanted them to be shiny pennies because they would be on camera,” Hooks said.
Checking his own spare change, Hooks didn’t have any 2024 pennies. He then went to his local bank and, despite examining hundreds of pennies, couldn’t find a penny minted this year.
“The teller was giving me strange looks until I explained, ‘These are actually going to the space station and I have to clean them tomorrow,'” Hooks said. “Then the teller started opening different rolls and others started helping me. I don’t know how many rolls we went through, but we couldn’t find a single 2024 penny.”
Some tellers asked if the U.S. Mint had minted any pennies for this year. In fact, more than 800 million Lincoln cents had been minted and were in circulation through April. So Hooks called on NASA and his network of educators. “Who has a 2024 penny?”
“I got a few from people who work at the Johnson Space Center and a few from local teachers. I put them together, picked the brightest ones, and those are the two that went up,” he said.
Relating to: The International Space Station — Everything you need to know
Penny population
The two pennies currently in space aren’t the first to leave Earth, but they’re still a rare “change” from what’s typically launched.
“From my research, I know that there was a US cent that was flown on Apollo 11 (by Neil Armstrong). [and] “A few pennies flew in Apollo 14 — one that was part of a multiple-coin set and one that was a 1948-D penny,” says Richard Jurek, co-host of the “Two Space Collectors Collecting Space” podcast and founder of the Jefferson Space Museum, a website dedicated to the history of $2 bills that have orbited Earth or gone to the moon.
“On Apollo 15, a 1969-D penny and a 1970-D penny were flown for support crew members. Also on this mission, an 1845 Large Cent and an Indian Head penny (date unknown) were flown for support crew members,” Jurek said. (The “D” refers to Denver, one of the places where the U.S. Mint mints coins, and Philadelphia. [“P”] and San Francisco [“S”].)
The first penny sent into space may also be the oldest and most valuable. A 1793 Flowing Hair cent—the second style of penny issued by the United States—was flown to a coin collector by the Gemini 7 crew’s flight surgeon in 1965. Packed inside the mission’s in-flight medical kit (without NASA’s prior knowledge), the already rare one-cent piece sold at auction 50 years later for $82,250.
In 1972, following a congressional investigation into personal items carried by astronauts, NASA established a policy that crew members could not fly certain items, including coins, that were “inherently susceptible to abuse by recipients.” This guideline still stands today, as no astronaut on a U.S. mission has carried coins in more than 50 years.
The same restriction applies to the Official Flight Kit (OFK), a duffel-sized pouch containing memorabilia flown by NASA and its partners and crew for distribution to organizations and employees.
But this policy does not apply to robotic explorers making one-way trips into space.
The farthest-flying penny landed on Mars in 2012. The penny, nicknamed the “red penny” because it quickly became covered in Martian dust, was mounted on the calibration target of the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on NASA’s Curiosity rover.
Lead researcher Ken Edgett selected and purchased the penny, a 1909 “VDB” cent bearing the initials of the coin’s designer (Victor David Brenner) and minted on the centennial of President Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Edgett attached it to the target as a “hat tip” to geologists’ informal practice of placing a coin (or other object of known scale) on field photographs.
RELATED STORIES:
— SpaceX launches private Cygnus cargo ship to ISS (video, photos)
— Follow the ISS: How and where can you see it?
— Northrop Grumman names Cygnus cargo ship after fallen Challenger commander
Cents for circulation
Hooks said he wasn’t aware of any other pennies launched by the education office. As for the current pair, they “could be floating around” on the space station.
“Especially in our educational elements, we try to use them in as many new ways as possible,” he said. “So I think you’ll see these pennies being reused as many times as possible before they come back down to Earth.”
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