2000 National Space Centre
One of the Millennium Projects commemorated on stamps was the National Space
Centre at Leicester. The Centre, which has a particularly distinctive space-age
building, was not finished at the time the stamp was released in 2000 January
and so could not be illustrated. Instead it is represented by a generic picture
of the night sky taken by Ian McKinnell and supplied by the Telegraph Colour
Library. This same stamp reappeared as a sheet of four in the so-called
Prestige booklet issued with the 2002 Astronomy stamps, but with the face value
“26” changed to “1st”.
The National Space Centre stamp was part of a set of four released under the
collective title Above and Beyond. It carries the number “Millennium 2000/2” indicating that it was the second in the series of millennium commemoratives
issued in 2000. The other three in the Above and Beyond set were:
19p, Third Millennium World Owl Trust, Muncaster Castle, Cumbria (2000/1); 44p,
Torrs Millennium Walkway, New Mills, Derbyshire (2000/3); 64p, Scottish Seabird
Centre, North Berwick (2000/4).
Stanley Gibbons no. 2126