How much to send a Christmas card to Mars? Royal Mail's brilliant reply to boy's question
A wannabe astronaut who wanted to send a Christmas card to Mars but was worried he did not have enough money for stamps has received an out of this world response from the postal service.
Five-year-old Oliver Giddings had bosses at Royal Mail scratching their heads when he penned his unusual request.
But the company were determined to find an answer and enlisted the help of the NASA Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, USA, to get it.
Oliver received his own note back from Royal Mail which laid out that taking into account the weight of his letter, the 567 million km distance from Mars to the earth and the cost of rocket fuel, sending such a correspondence would set the youngster back a cool £11,602.25.
That's the equivalent of 18,416 first class stamps or 21,466 second class stamps.
NASA worked out it would cost about £12,000, to fly a letter weighing up to 100g to Mars.Possible questions:
- How much does a first (or second) class stamp cost?
- How big would the envelope need to be to take that many stamps?
- How much would it cost to send a particular object to Mars? [Choose your object: computer, pizza (might be cold by the time it arrives), guitar (they had one on the ISS), anything else ...]
