Photo from open sources
The youngest resident of the English city of Chesterfield, most of all on wishing to become an astronaut, sent a very unusual request to the Royal Mail of the United Kingdom.
Five-year-old Oliver asked how much shipping would cost ordinary letters to the Red Planet. Despite the non-standard question, the department officials decided not to ignore him and answered to the boy. To do this, they had to enlist the help of NASA.
Representatives of the American Space Agency approached this task in all seriousness. For starters, they reported that the weight of the envelope is very important – every extra drop of ink will be certainly increase the cost of space delivery correspondence. One of NASA employees took a A4 sheet and wrote a message on both sides of his wife. Specialists put the letter in a standard envelope and stuck a stamp on it, although no one, of course, knows what the brands would be if interplanetary mail really existed.
The experts measured the weight and volume of the letter, then calculated how much it would be worth transporting such cargo to the Red Planet. It turned out that she would have cost the earthling about eighteen one thousand dollars. If you transfer this to Russian money at the current rate, it will turn out about one million two hundred thousand rubles. Thus, correspondence with Martians in theory could only the richest inhabitants of our planet.
Space Agency staff say that Oliver’s question not really stupid. The fact is that Internet connection is still unable to overcome the distance of fifty-five million kilometers, so about email in this case can’t go and talk. If today on the Red Planet really lived a colony of people, then correspondence with it could be carried out only through classic paper mail.
Mars NASA
