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Size: 11" x 6" flat
🚀 A space shuttle blasting off through a big pink-and-yellow YOUNG ASTRONAUTS USA logo, planets and stars all over a speckled kraft bag, and enough games printed on it to keep a kid busy through a whole order of fries. It's a McDonald's Happy Meal bag marked © 1991, never used, never folded open.
The front says McDonald's Happy Meal Presents YOUNG ASTRONAUTS USA and has a star-poking project: cut out the panel, poke a pen through the pink dots of the Little Dipper, Big Dipper and Andromeda, and hold it up to a light to see "how much brighter stars look when seen FROM SPACE!" The back has Space Speak, a radio quiz on what "Roger!", "Over and out!" and "Do you read me?" really mean, a secret message from the astronauts to future space travelers, and Crater Crazy, a moon full of craters to match up. My favorite is down in the corner star: "What do you call lunar french fries?" Crater taters.
The bottom panel has the answers ("Satellite message: Earth says hello!"), a PROOF OF PURCHASE box, © 1991 McDonald's Corporation, "Printed in United States of America", the codes McD# 91-115 and H-02-6-92-C, and "Made with recycled paper, 65% post-consumer content." The top reminds you, PLEASE PUT LITTER IN ITS PLACE.
The Young Astronauts were a real program. President Reagan launched it on the South Lawn of the White House on October 17, 1984, to get kids excited about science, math and space, telling them "the sky's not the limit." It was the idea of the newspaper columnist Jack Anderson, and the Young Astronaut Council in Washington ran it with Anderson, the broadcaster Hugh Downs and the public relations man Harold Burson, with NASA and teachers' groups helping put together the lessons and activities for school clubs.
McDonald's got on board with Young Astronauts Happy Meals. The 1986 box folded into a moonbase, with a fuel depot, a workstation and a lunar lookout telescope to cut out, and the chain came back to the theme in the early 1990s with this bag and a set of build-them-yourself space vehicle toys.
🖼️ Frame it flat for a kid's room, a classroom or a STEM corner, or add it to your McDonald's collection. It's a fun one for anybody who was in a Young Astronauts club.
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