Gary Cooper

In the summer of 1969, a teenager in Maine watched Neil Armstrong step onto the Moon. Fifty years later, that same man designed the coin that marks the moment.

Gary Cooper is a sculptor from Belfast, Maine. He graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1974 with a degree in graphic and industrial design, then spent more than two decades working in design before turning to sculpture in 1998. By the time the Apollo 11 commission came around, he had spent over forty years as a working artist — and twenty of them trying to get a design onto a coin.

His first attempt was the Sacagawea dollar. In 1998 he submitted an eagle-in-flight design for the coin's reverse — the "tails" side — and even mailed out a thousand postcards promoting it. It went nowhere. He applied to the U.S. Mint's Artistic Infusion Program — the Mint's roster of outside artists — several times, and was never selected. For twenty years, the door stayed shut.

What makes Cooper unusual is that he is not a Mint sculptor-engraver and never has been. Almost every name on a modern U.S. coin belongs to a Mint staff artist or an Artistic Infusion Program designer. Cooper was neither. He got onto a coin through the rarest route there is: a public competition open to all comers.

For the Apollo 11 50th Anniversary coins, Congress required a juried design contest for the obverse — the "heads" side. Cooper entered. His idea was almost defiantly simple: a single bootprint pressed into lunar dust. Around the rim he set the names of the programs that built toward the landing — MERCURY, GEMINI, APOLLO — separated by phases of the Moon waxing toward full.

The power of the design is in what it leaves out. There is 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." It is a medallist's instinct — Cooper belongs to the American Medallic Sculpture Association and FIDEM, the international art-medal federation — and it is why the design works at coin scale, where clutter dies and a single bold image survives.

His drawing was the concept, not the finished tool. As is standard at the Mint, a staff sculptor-engraver — Joseph F. Menna — adapted Cooper's design and prepared it for striking, rotating the bootprint and repositioning the lettering. The coins themselves are curved: dished inward on the obverse, domed outward on the reverse, so the design sits in a shallow bowl. On that convex reverse, Mint sculptor-engraver Phebe Hemphill engraved a close-up of Buzz Aldrin's helmet visor, with Armstrong, the flag, and the lunar module Eagle mirrored in the glass.

For the work, Cooper was paid $5,500 — $500 for reaching the final round, and $5,000 for the win. After twenty years, his bootprint went onto four coins at once: gold, silver, and clad, struck only in 2019.