Postcard IN SPACE With Blue Origin... Lands in a Custom Hexagon Frame! [NUC #10]

My daughter sent her space unicorn drawing to... space with Blue Origin. It came back, and now it's in a hexagonal frame! Novel Use Case #10.

Several years ago, my kids’ attended a Maker Faire in Orlando Florida, where–among many other notable exhibits–representatives of the Blue Origin space program were giving out postcards for kids to draw on. When sent in (with return postage), they hitch a ride to space on a New Shepard rocket, then get sent back via the USPS to wherever you reside.

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You can still send in postcards today if you’re so inclined. Yesterday my daughter’s card arrived in the mail, stamped that it had indeed been to space. While extremely cool, it did take well over two years to get it back,¹ so don’t try this if you’re going to move soon or are a generally impatient person.

She was delighted of course, but I didn’t want this to get lumped in with the rest of our mail and potentially discarded. I just so happened to be working on a series of hexagonal business card frames (see the footnotes on this post), so I made a larger postcard-sized device seen below:

Note the “ROYGBIV” label on the horn. Impressively, she did this (accurate, even if “BIV” may have gotten truncated) labeling herself.

I scaled up the original business card design to a 103 x 142 mm interior rectangle to accommodate the larger postcard payload, sent the design to my laser cutter, printed more holder studs, and voila! I had a new futuristic-looking frame.

I traced out “SPACE UNICORN” with masking tape before spray painting it black², leaving awesome light lettering to further highlight the treasure inside. This should be a great souvenir, and will hopefully be inspirational as she and the other kids look at it.

Space & digital manufacturing - the final frontier?

• CAD/laser/3D printers are awesome if you want customized “things.” At the same time, in terms of labor costs (sans 1000% tariffs or what have you), ordering a frame off of Amazon would have been cheaper.

• When I wanted to make a slightly modified version of this as a tessellating second frame, I just changed a few things around and “lasered up” a new one. How cool.

• Space is more accessible than ever. Sure, Blue Origin is being generous here, but the fact that you can send something to space for the price of two stamps is incredible. Of course, maybe this won’t even be impressive by the time my kids are my age… 2050: “Oh a postcard? from space? Just put it in the cyber-pile with the rest of the junk mail.”

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Thanks for reading! I hope you will follow along as I post weekly about engineering, technology, making, and projects. Fair warning: I am a native Florida man, and may get a little off-topic in the footnotes. Maybe I even had an alligator or two as pets growing up. Perhaps they are alive today and could be used to test earth-wormhole pet friendliness. -JC

1. IIRC - not exactly sure when we sent the cards in.

Now my older daughter. My son also sent one in, but it has not arrived back yet. Hopefully it will at some point, but he (thankfully) didn’t complain too much… Wonder what intern got the job of postcard stamper. If you’re that person I’d love to know more - hi at jeremyscook.com.

2. I was originally going to leave it unpainted, and masked off the lettering to avoid burn marks when engraving the letters with the laser. Fortunately I hadn’t picked off the internals of the tape when I did decide to paint it and it turned out great.

Also, “space unicorn” was either inspired by this song, and/or via a conversation with Mike & Ryan from Physics Anonymous. Finally, big h/t to Proto G, who was representing Blue Origin when we actually got the cards to send in.