Mission patch

Instead, astronauts in flight wore mission patches of fire-resistant Beta cloth onto which designs were silkscreened.

[3] (Embroidered patches were still produced for ground side wear, non-flight personnel, sale to collectors and to be flown in space as souvenirs.)

The first spacewalker, Alexei Leonov wore a general patch on his EVA representing a rocket taking off Earth,[4] which was also used on subsequent flights.

As part of the Interkosmos program, the crewed flights to the Salyut and Mir space stations between 1978 and 1988 featured mission logos.

This prompted astronaut Gordon Cooper to propose and develop a mission patch for his and Pete Conrad's 1965 Gemini 5 flight: an embroidered cloth patch sporting the names of the two crew members, a covered wagon, and the slogan "8 Days or Bust" which referred to the expected mission duration.

NASA administrator James E. Webb approved the design, but insisted on the removal of the slogan from the official version of the patch.

Although European human spaceflight, performed by ESA, is dependent on US or Russian launches, most European astronauts have worn a patch designed for their particular mission (apart from some of the earlier Shuttle flights, when ESA astronauts wore the same crew patches as their NASA colleagues).

On the US side, artist like Jean Bealieu, William Bradley, James Cooper, Victor Craft, Jerry Elmore, Frank Kelly Freas, Barbara Matelski, Robert T. McCall, Jean Pinataro, Emilio Pucci, Gene Rickman, Allen Stevens, Norman Tiller, Walter A. Weber, and Lumen M. Winter took care of patch designs.

[10] More recently Tim Gagnon of the US and Jorge Cartes of Spain designed Shuttle and ISS expedition patches, while Luc van den Abeelen and Erik van der Hoorn, both of the Netherlands, provided art for Russian Soyuz missions to ISS.

Since 1971, all official NASA mission patches have been produced by a single supplier: A-B Emblem of Weaverville, North Carolina.

But a number of years ago, the company switched embroidery machines, and recent versions of older Shuttle patches differ from the originals, making the latter more interesting to serious collectors.