— With Barbie you can be anything, even an astronaut ... on a postage stamp.

The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) on Saturday (July 11) "honored the possibilities and hope" conveyed by Mattel's long-running line of teenage fashion dolls by issuing a new series of ten Barbie collectible stamps. Themed around the doll's careers throughout the years, one the stamps depicts Barbie as an astronaut.

"Two decades after Barbie first went to space, this 1986 astronaut suited up in a very '80s broad-shouldered spacesuit in hot pink and silver lamé, with a bubble-helmet worn over dark brunette hair," reads the postal service's description of the Forever-denomination stamp.

Just two years after Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the world's first woman to fly into space, Mattel offered a silvery-spacesuit for its Barbie dolls to wear in 1965. Marketed as an outfit accessory alone, the Barbie Miss Astronaut set included brown mittens and matching boots, as well a hard shell white helmet. The suit, itself, was loosely based on the garments worn by NASA's Mercury and Gemini pilots.

It would not be for another 13 years after Barbie Miss Astronaut's debut that the U.S space program would select its first six female candidates and then not until 1983 that Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. (Ride would later be posthumously honored as an "Inspiring Woman," with a Barbie doll modeled after her own appearance in 2019.)

The Astronaut Barbie that the USPS and Mattel opted to feature on the new stamp was one of the more futuristic, pink-forward versions of the space traveler dolls. Still, it was the first spacesuited doll to come as a Caucasian or Black Barbie. Both the USPS and Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum display the African-American version.

"Even though six female astronauts had been selected for NASA's space shuttle program by 1985, when this dolls was issued, the doll's space-age outfit is more fantastical then realistic," the card accompanying the doll's museum display reads.

The first African-American woman astronaut to launch into space, Mae Jemison, flew on a 7-day space shuttle mission in 1992.

The pane and stamps were designed by Ethel Kessler, a USPS art director, in collaboration with Mattel, using photography from the toy company. The other careers depicted by the nine other stamps include registered nurse, surgeon, firefighter, paleontologist, sign language teacher, robotics engineer, judge, soccer player and musical artist. A sheet of 10 stamps costs $7.80.

Most recently released Barbie dolls adopted more realistic outfits, and like the Ride doll, took on the persona of real astronauts. Ellen Ochoa, the first Hispanic woman in space; European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti; Russian cosmonaut Anna Kikina; Katya "Kat" Echazarreta, the first Mexican-born woman to fly into space on a 2022 Blue Origin New Shepard suborbital launch; and Kellie Gerardi, who flew on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo in 2023 have also had Barbie dolls created in their likeness.

Though Barbie has appeared on a U.S. stamp before, this is the first time she has appeared as an astronaut. The stamps were issued at the annual National Barbie Doll Collectors Convention in Austin, Texas on Saturday.