50 Dollars Mercury

The Marshall Islands established its commemorative coinage program in the late 1980s largely as a revenue instrument — coins struck for foreign collectors rather than domestic circulation. This 1994 issue honors the Mercury space program, NASA's first human spaceflight effort, which ran from 1958 to 1963 and put six Americans into space before handing off to Gemini.

The $50 face value is a legal fiction; no Marshall Islander was spending these at face.