Chinese letters routed via spacecraft and postmarked from space

The Chinese Post Office have launched a service for letters to be postmarked from space.

Earlier this year we featured a service launched by Beijing Post that delivers love letters seven years after the date of posting, to help married couples through the “seven year itch”. Now the latest initiative to encourage more use of paper mail from China Post enables letters to be routed via a spacecraft and postmarked from space. As reported by PHYSORG.COM, in order for a letter to be delivered with a “Space City 1” postmark, an email version is sent to a computer on the Tiangong-1 spacecraft currently orbiting Earth. The email is re-routed to the China Space Post Office located in Beijing to be printed and inserted into a space-themed envelope. Envelopes are marked with the special space stamp before being sent on in the mail. According to smartplanet, the China Space Post Office also sells a range of stamps, postcards and envelopes commemorating previous Chinese space missions, and is said to be headed by China’s first astronaut, Yang Liwei. As more people choose to communicate online, so post offices around the world are searching for innovations to keep physical mail an attractive option. One of many ideas that can help to get consumers offline and into the real world! Spotted by: Raymond Neo