Introduction

This site is dedicated to the artists behind the patches depicted on this site, including

While this site includes a page with brief biographical sketches of many the artists whose work directly or indirectly resulted in the patches documented here, there are still some who are virtually unknown — like thousands and thousands of men and women whose work resulted pioneering flight that constituted the “Golden Age” of spaceflight — and so I have no information about them beyond their names. Thank you all.

Back in the Mercury era astronauts would climb into their capsules and be shot into space on a rocket, and people would hear about it on the radio, or maybe see it during the 6-o’clock news on TV. They would read the details in the newspaper the next day, or in newsmagazines the next week. There were photos (usually black & white) of the courageous men and their brave families, but no iconic, emblematic symbols existed — no mission patches!

Even after the mission patch was invented by the crew of Gemini 5, for years patches were not publicly well known — they were pretty much the domain of the flight crew and those intimately involved in the conduct of the flight. Patches weren’t sold at visitor centers or museums; they weren’t used to symbolize the flight in print or TV coverage.

In 1968, shortly before the Apollo 7 flight, Life magazine published an article by Dora Jane Hamblin about patches, and this was really the first exposure most people had to the topic. Patches remained relatively obscure until public interest in spaceflight peaked with Apollo 11. By then many Americans had become transfixed by the epic flight to the Moon, and in response, seemingly every entrepreneur in the country was prepared to capitalize on the Moon-mania — and the easiest way to do that was to slap an Apollo 11 patch on anything that wasn’t nailed down.

Shortly after the completion of the first moon landing, NASA became alarmed by the rampant commercial use of the Apollo 11 patch image. Eventually FBI agents were dispatched in an attempt to rein in the rampant use and misuse of the Apollo 11 patch, and mission patches in general. Amazingly, even AB Emblem was targeted, since they had not been an “official” supplier of the patch.

By now patches were, if not big business, at least a big deal for companies that produced them. Previously, astronauts had selected embroidery firms without any coordination: Lion Brothers, Texas Art Embroidery, Dallas Cap and Emblem, Stylized Emblem, etc. Spacecraft manufacturers North American and Grumman went their own way in procuring embroidered patches. In 1970 MSC Management decided it would be best to centralize and formalize patch procurement and solicited bids for a long-term contract. AB Emblem easily won the bid, based partly on high quality, but largely because of their extraordinarily low bid — less than 50 cents per patch, considerably below cost. For AB, the point was mind-share: profit would come not from NASA procurements, but from consumer demand.

With this contract, AB Emblem could now legitimately claim to be the “official” supplier to NASA. They set about filling gaps in their offerings: first with the early Apollo flights that they hadn’t previously done: Apollo 7 through 10. Then they created commemorative patches for Gemini 5 through 12; and finally, and most insultingly, creating patch designs out of whole cloth (yes, pun most certainly intended): Gemini 3, Gemini 4, and a whole set of Mercury patches. Some of these were painfully bad...

How Good Patches Become Bad Patches

To be fair to AB Emblem, aside from these after-the-fact souvenir patches, the patches they produced were generally excellent; and beginning with Apollo 15 they produced (in my opinion) patches of greater fidelity than their rival Lion Brothers, whose earlier Apollo 7-10 patches had been far superior. But they have never atoned (to date) for their spectacularly hideous Apollo 7, 9 and 10 patches.

My aim for this site is to share how patches came into being, show the mostly good — and occasionally sublime — artwork behind the patches, and especially to celebrate the artists who created them.

I was 12 years old when Apollo 11 landed on the moon. I had been avidly following the space program since mid-way through the Gemini project. I devoured everything I could find on the subject of space flight. By the time of the last Apollo launch (the Apollo-Soyuz flight in 1975) I had amassed quite a collection of “stuff” relating to space missions. Subsequent upheavals in my life resulted in the dispersion of the bulk of this material. One of the few things I preserved was my prized collection of Apollo patches that I had collected at the time of the flights. I intentionally did not have any patches for missions prior to Apollo 11, because I felt that the patches that were available simply didn’t look like the actual patch designs, and were sometimes downright ugly (see the AB Emblem “souvenir” Apollo 7 patch above).

With the advent of the Internet, I discovered that I could easily collect images of the original designs, and that there actually were better embroidered patches, and they were out there to be had. Since then, I have substantially enhanced my collection of patches. More information on acquiring patches can be found on the Collecting and Resources pages.

If you’d like to contact me about any aspect of space patches, and especially if you have any comments about this site, please feel free send me feedback. I’d love to hear any additional information you might have about the subject.