Nowadays they say that a penny doesn't get you very far. NASA has now added its two cents to that.
Two pennies were launched Sunday (Aug. 4) to the International Space Station (ISS) on a mission that will ultimately travel millions of miles. The U.S. one-cent coins were launched aboard the "SS Francis R. 'Dick' Scobee," Northrop Grumman's 21st Cygnus cargo spacecraft, named in memory of the fallen commander of NASA's space shuttle Challenger.
The two pennies were launched into space by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, making a rare addition to the unmanned capsule's 3,720 kilograms (8,300 lb) of cargo.
"The pennies are used in what's called the 'Screaming Balloon' demonstration," Michele Hooks, education project manager for NASA's Office of STEM Engagement, said in an interview with collectSPACE.com. "A penny is inserted into a deflated balloon, and then an astronaut inflates the balloon and spins it to compare it to a hex nut that's threaded into a second balloon."
The "STEMonstration" is the latest in a series of short educational videos filmed on the space station that are intended to engage elementary school children with science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) topics. Each STEMonstration is designed so that students can replicate the experiment in their classrooms - hence the use of pennies.
"We wanted something simple that students could access, and there's enough money for that," Hooks said.
Related: Facts about Cygnus, Northrop Grumman's cargo ship
Searching for cents
Pennies are indeed easy to find, assuming you're happy with any random cent. For the coins now in space, Hooks and her team were a bit more selective.
"We wanted the pennies to be 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.
When she checked her own change, Hooks found she didn't have a penny dated 2024. She went to her local bank and, despite sifting through hundreds of pennies, couldn't find a cent minted this year.
"The teller looked at me strangely until I explained, 'These are actually going to the space station and I have to have them released tomorrow,'" Hooks said. "Then the teller started opening different rolls of pennies and others started helping me. I don't know how many rolls we went through, but we couldn't find a single penny from 2024."
Some tellers wondered if the U.S. Mint had struck any pennies this year. In fact, more than 800 million Lincoln cents had been struck and put into circulation as of April. So Hooks put out a call to NASA and its network of educators. "Who's got a 2024 penny?"
"I ended up getting a few from people who work at Johnson Space Center and some from local teachers. I put them together, picked the shiniest one and those two went up," she said.
Related: International Space Station - Everything You Need to Know
Penny population
The two pennies now in space are not the first to leave Earth, but they still represent a rare "change" from what is typically launched.
"From my research I know that an American penny was flown on Apollo 11 (by Neil Armstrong, no less) [and] "A few pennies flew on Apollo 14 - one as part of a multi-coin set and a 1948-D penny," said 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 the $2 bills that have orbited the Earth or gone to the moon.
"Apollo 15 flew a 1969-D penny and a 1970-D penny for support crew members. Also flying on this mission for support crew members was an 1845 Large Cent and an Indian Head penny (date unknown)," Jurek said. (The "D" stands for Denver, one of the U.S. Mint's coin-minting locations, along with Philadelphia ["P"] and San Francisco ["S"].)
The first penny flown into space may also be the oldest and most valuable. A 1793 Flowing Hair penny-only the second penny ever issued by the U.S.-was flown to a coin collector in 1965 by the Gemini 7 flight surgeon. The already rare one-cent piece, which was included in the mission's medical kit (unbeknownst to NASA), sold at auction 50 years later for $82,250.
In 1972, after a congressional investigation into astronauts' personal effects, NASA instituted a policy that crew members were not allowed to carry certain items, including coins. These items "were inherently open to exploitation by their recipients." This policy still stands, and no astronaut on a U.S. mission has packed pennies in more than 50 years.
The same restriction applies to the Official Flight Kit (OFK), a duffel-sized bag of memorabilia flown by NASA and its partners, and by the crew, and distributed to organizations and employees.
But the policy does not apply to robotic explorers making a one-way trip to space.
The farthest-flown penny landed on Mars in 2012. The "red penny," so named because it quickly became covered in Martian dust, was attached to the calibration target for the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) on NASA's Curiosity rover.
Lead researcher Ken Edgett selected and purchased the penny, a 1909 "VDB" penny, which bears the initials of the coin's designer (Victor David Brenner) and was minted on the 100th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln's birth. Edgett affixed the penny to the target as a "tip of the hat" to the informal practice of geologists of placing a coin (or other object of known scale) on their field photographs.
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Cents for circulation
Hooks said she was not aware of any other pennies launched by the education agency. As for the current pair, they could "come into orbit" aboard the space station.
"With our educational items in particular, we're looking to reuse them as often as possible in new ways," she said. "So I imagine you'll see these pennies reused as many times as possible before they return to Earth."
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