60 Years of Spaceflight Patches | Hacker News Reader

60 Years of Spaceflight Patches

arstechnica.com

62 pointsbookofjoe15 comments

I have that Sally Ride mission patch, signed by Sally. It is one of my prized possessions. I'd post a picture but it is in storage right now. It's stuck on a poster of a Space Shuttle.

I was lucky enough to get a lot of access to shuttle crews and missions because my dad worked on the Shuttle program, so I have a lot of Shuttle things in storage. Including my t-shirt from the Endeavor rollout!

One of my most treasured possessions is a cloth Velcro patch display panel holding all my patches from various military deployments. The official unit patches are good and all, but nothing holds a candle to the creativity of military personnel with access to a patch making shop while deployed.

Patch collecting is more fun once you learn the hidden language of military patches. Hint: count the stars in the shuttle patches shown in the article. Or google around for flight test squadron patches with a 5+1 star motif. Things like lightning bolts have meanings too.

Or perhaps the most famous secret hidden in a patch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-38

Admittedly, the secret language has largely been lost. Newer patches are more "looks cool" than a reflection of the mission.

Had to dig around to find this https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1197/1

I was hoping this was going to be about patches to code.

Me too, would have been very interesting to compare how a (code) patch looked/was deployed 60 years ago, compared to today :) Wonder what the size difference would be.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42385393 When the only copy of your computer is 15 billion miles away, and the documentation is OCR'd 50 year old printouts, and no one recorded what was patched when

Apollo patches would require new strands of wire, and then literally woven through the proper rings. There was no git push and no CI/CD available.

Same here, or patches to malfunctioning systems while in space, such as the Apollo 13 carbon-dioxide scrubber hack.

Me too. But I'm not that disappointed.

The little town I grew up in (Weaverville, NC) housed the factory that made all the patches for NASA missions (AB Emblem). Most of the manufacturing plants there have since closed down, but it always made me happy that my little part of Appalachia made something cool.

For way more info about military patches, challenge coins, and how to decode them, check out "From the Archives of Peter Merlin, Aviation Archaeologist" by Trevor Paglen.

He goes into detail about how patches with aliens indicate the project took place at Area 51, and that lightning bolts represent electronic warfare.

https://primaryinformation.org/product/from-the-archives-of-...

There is a whole world of space patch collecting and whatnot. The different companies and sometimes mistakes make some patches worth more then others. Of course, flown patches also still collect a nice sum. Me and my father own a large number of flown patches and "beta cloth" patches.

Growing up, I bought an Apollo 9 patch on ebay that I liked. I shortly after got an email from none other then John Bisney who said it was a variety he had never seen before and offered me a small sum for it. As a kid still using dial-up, it was quite the experience at the time!

I am reading "The Last Hero" by Terry Pratchett and it has a mission patch design that is obviously inspired by NASA mission patches. It has the motto "Morituri Nolumus Mori" on it and some great artwork.

I got a few things from a gift shop in the Kennedy Space Center, but I don't remember if they sell those so one can sew on a backpack.

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