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