50 Dollars USS Hornet

The USS Hornet (CV-12) was the Essex-class carrier that recovered the Apollo 11 and Apollo 12 astronauts after splashdown — a role assigned partly because the ship had already been fitted with biological isolation facilities following uncertainty about lunar contamination protocols. The Marshall Islands issued commemorative silver dollars throughout the 1990s at a pace that strained credibility as a sovereign coinage program, but the underlying subjects were often genuinely well-chosen.

CV-12 was also the ship from which Jimmy Doolittle received his Medal of Honor citation in 1942 — though that ceremony took place aboard the original Hornet, CV-8, lost at Santa Cruz that October.