Gary Cooper

In July 1969, a teenager in Maine pointed a new telescope at the Moon, hunting for the spacecraft carrying two men to its surface. His father had just bought him the telescope. Fifty years later, that same man designed the coin that marks the moment. "I remember exactly where I was the day the astronauts landed," Cooper later said.

Gary Cooper is a sculptor from Belfast, Maine — not a Mint employee, which is the first surprising thing about him. He earned a degree in graphic and industrial design from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1974, worked in design for more than two decades, then turned to sculpture full-time in 1998. Along the way he became a serious coin collector and a working medallist, producing relief work and medals for the state of Maine.

He also spent twenty years trying to get his own design onto a U.S. coin — and failing. His first real attempt came in 1998, when he entered an eagle-in-flight design for the reverse — the "tails" side — of the new Sacagawea dollar. He believed in it enough to print and mail a thousand postcards promoting it to the Mint, to the dollar-coin advisory committee, and to members of Congress. It went nowhere. He applied to the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program — the official roster of outside artists the Mint hires from — more than once, and was never picked. For two decades, the door stayed shut.

What makes Cooper genuinely rare is the route he took. Nearly every design on a modern American coin comes from a Mint staff sculptor-engraver or from an Artistic Infusion Program artist. Cooper was neither. He got onto a coin through the hardest path there is: a public competition open to all comers.

For the obverse — the "heads" side — of the 2019 Apollo 11 50th Anniversary coins, the Mint ran an open juried contest. Cooper's idea was almost defiantly plain: a single bootprint pressed into lunar dust. He worked it up in 3D sculpting software, basing the shape on a NASA Hasselblad photograph from the surface and solving the problem of the dark, shadowed heel by sculpting it rather than copying the flat photo. Around the rim he placed the names of the programs that built toward the landing — MERCURY, GEMINI, APOLLO — separated by phases of the Moon waxing toward full.

His design beat 118 others. From 119 submissions the jury cut to 18 finalists, then in late 2017 the Mint asked Cooper for two modified versions of his entry. One of them won. The power of it is in what it leaves out: no rocket, no flag, no portrait — just the mark a human foot left on another world. "That footprint wasn't Armstrong's footprint," Cooper said. "It was everybody on Earth's at the time." That instinct — let one bold image carry everything — is exactly what survives at coin scale, where clutter dies. It is the medallist's discipline, and Cooper has it: he belongs to the American Medallic Sculpture Association and to FIDEM, the international art-medal federation.

A drawing is not a coin, though. As is standard at the Mint, a staff sculptor-engraver — Joseph F. Menna, later the Mint's Chief Engraver — adapted Cooper's design for striking, rotating the bootprint slightly and resetting the lettering. The finished coins are curved: the obverse dished inward (concave), the reverse domed outward (convex), so each design sits in a shallow bowl. On that convex reverse, Mint sculptor-engraver Phebe Hemphill engraved a tight close-up of Buzz Aldrin's helmet visor, with Armstrong, the U.S. flag, and the lunar module Eagle reflected in the glass.

The fee for putting a design on four U.S. coins at once was modest: $5,500 in all — $500 for reaching the final round, and a $5,000 bonus for the win. There is a small, telling postscript. Despite designing them, Cooper had to buy his own coins at retail like everyone else. "That's the government for you," he remarked.

The recognition outran the paycheck. In 2021 the program's five-ounce silver dollar was named Coin of the Year for 2019-dated issues — the top prize in an international vote run by World Coin News — and it swept Best Contemporary Event Coin and Best Silver Coin on the way to the overall title. An outsider who had been turned down for twenty years had designed the most honored U.S. coin of its year.