Last Real Heroes issue

The last issue in CIT’s Real Heroes Series for the Cook Islands features has been released and features an astronaut. Whether you refer to them as astronauts, cosmonauts or taikonauts, a special kind of courage is required to leave the earth’s atmosphere. This was never truer than with the first men who set foot on the moon with the Apollo 11 spacecraft. The first lunar landing from 16 July to 24 July 1969 sparked a fascination with space, with launch and landing broadcast live around the world.

Minted in ultra-high relief, the reverse of the $20 silver coin recreates an image from the centre of the astronaut’s visor of the Earth rising above the lunar horizon – one of the iconic images from Apollo 11. The moon’s surface is reflected in the black visor of the helmet. The demanding task of colouring the strongly curved surface was carried out by B H Mayer’s Kunstprägeanstalt in Munich. The coloured visor on the reverse takes up a large proportion of the head-andshoulder portrait of an astronaut, whose spacesuit has a logo and an inscription that reads ‘DRE/DISCOVER RESEARCH EXPLORE’. In the background, the logo of the series with the legend ‘REAL HERO’ is within a honeycomb pattern. Around the rim of the reverse is the legend – ‘THE SKY IS NOT THE LIMIT’.

Space is depicted on the upper half of the obverse, with the International Space Station, two floating astronauts and planet Earth. In the lower, granulated half, there is a circle containing a portrait of King Charles III by Dan Thorne and above it ‘ONLY THE BRAVE ARE FREE’.