A bill that passed the House last week would result in some commemorative coins for NASA. The “NASA and JPL 50th Anniversary Commemorative Coin Act” (HR 68), introduced back in January by Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) and with 290 co-sponsors, passed the House on a voice vote July 12. The bill would require the Treasury Department to mint up to 50,000 gold and 400,000 silver coins with face values of $50 and $1, respectively (while legal tender, the coins would be worth far more than their face value in metal content alone: the gold coin would contain one troy ounce of gold, currently valued at around $420, while the silver coin would contain a little over three-quarters of a troy ounce of silver, worth over $5.) The coins would be minted in 2008, the 50th anniversary of NASA and the transfer of JPL from the Army to NASA, although JPL itself dates back to the 1930s.
The bill goes into considerable detail about the design of the coins. The gold con would feature “an image of the sun” on the obverse (front) and “a design emblematic of the sacrifice of the United States astronauts who lost their lives in the line of duty over the course of the space program” on the reverse, while the silver coin would have nine obverse designs, one for each planet, and the reverse “shall be emblematic of discoveries and missions of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to the planet depicted on the obverse of the coin”, with specific requirements for four of the coins (Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, and Pluto). In addition, the bill requires any federal agency with spacecraft in its possession on the ground to provide gold, silver, and other metals to the Mint for inclusion in the coins, so long as that retrieval does not damage the usefulness or historic nature of such spacecraft.
See this collectSPACE article for more details.
The commercial for these coins can go after the one for Japanese kitchen knives and before the one for 80 classical music excerpts.