Patchwork

GILBERT CHAN  |  April 6, 2026

I created a video titled “Space Art” with samples of NASA mission patches from Mercury through I the International Space Station program (see the video at youtu.be/oYx8TDjmJZw or search “space art happybear” on YouTube), and I got interested in the little stories the patches told. I wondered whether someone examining the mission logos without knowledge of the Space Shuttle missions could deduce their history, like an archaeologist examining wall inscriptions.

By the late 1970s, when the Shuttle program was starting, all of the Apollo astronauts had retired from NASA except Alan Bean and John Young. Young, a veteran of two Gemini and two Apollo missions, was the obvious choice to command the first Shuttle mission, STS-1. The patch lets you know it was all about testing the orbiter Columbia itself. After Bean chose to retire from NASA to pursue a career in art, Bob Crippen was selected to pilot the first launch of a crewed spaceplane on April 12, 1981. Young would also command STS-9, giving him two missions each in Gemini, Apollo, and Shuttle.

After STS-1, Crippen’s next mission was as commander of the orbiter Challenger in 1983, and the seven stars and robotic arm indicate both the mission number for STS-7 and its job of deploying and retrieving satellites. The inset logo on the right, resembling a sun with arrows, has a cross on one of its arms forming the female symbol (♀), also known as the Venus symbol. That was to recognize Mission Specialist Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. Crippen commanded two other missions on Challenger and was part of the review board investigating the loss of that vehicle on STS-51-L in 1986.

Ride’s next ride was also commanded by Crippen, STS-41-G. The big U.S. flag doesn’t give much hint about the mission, but the small Canadian one indicates that Marc Garneau was the first Canadian in space.

The central emblem that looks like a gold Christmas tree with a halo appears frequently on mission patches and represents the design of the NASA astronaut pin. There are five Mars symbols after the names, representing the men of the crew, and two Venus symbols representing the two women: Ride and Kathy Sullivan, who was the second American woman in space and became the first American female spacewalker on Oct. 11, 1984. Unlike Ride, who went to space 20 years after the first female cosmonaut, Sullivan was edged out of being the first woman spacewalker by cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya, whom the USSR sent on Soyuz T-12 to do an EVA working on the Salyut space station on July 25 that year.

Sullivan had one of the more interesting careers of NASA astronauts and deserves to be remembered for more than her three Shuttle missions. Having earned a PhD in geology and planning to research the ocean floor, she submitted an application to become a NASA astronaut only after a suggestion from her brother. While with NASA, she taught geology at Rice University and joined the Navy Reserves as an oceanography officer. She also served as chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and later as Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere. Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter subsequently spent a month underwater in the Navy’s SEALAB project and retired as a commander. Retired Captain Sullivan went a step further in 2020, becoming the eighth person, and first woman, to descend to the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench, the deepest known point in Earth’s oceans.

The patch for Sullivan’s second mission, STS-31 (and no, there are not 31 stars, planets, and galaxies in the background), hints at its historic deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. This was aboard the orbiter Discovery, which put the telescope in orbit using the remotely controlled Canadarm. Had that failed, Sullivan and Bruce McCandless were suited up to perform any needed manual adjustments.

Sullivan’s final space mission was aboard Atlantis on STS-45 in 1992. The ATLAS label refers to the ATLAS-1 Spacelab mission carried by Atlantis. The orientation of the Earth, with the North Pole on the right instead of at the top, is of interest, as is the placement of the names of Commander Charles Bolden and Pilot Brian Duffy at the bottom.

Bolden, a Marine pilot with more than 100 combat missions in Vietnam and experience as a test pilot, piloted Columbia on STS-61-C in 1986 and Discovery on STS-31 in 1990, his name appearing at the top of the logo next to the commander both times. But as commander on STS-45, his name appears at the bottom, and on STS-60 in 1994 it appears in the upper left, with the others following in alphabetical order, perhaps an indication of humility or team-building. After that mission, he returned to active duty with the Marines for another 10 years, reaching the rank of major general. From 2009–17 he served as NASA Administrator, the first and, to date, only African American to hold that position.

Also on the STS-45 patch, the name next to Sullivan at the top belongs to rookie mission specialist and fellow PhD holder Mike Foale. Born and raised in England with a doctorate in astrophysics, he came to the U.S. to work and was twice turned down for the NASA astronaut training program, though he did become employed at Johnson Space Center in Mission Control. His second flight was a year later on Discovery for STS-56, which carried the ATLAS2 mission into orbit. The names of commander Ken Cameron and pilot Steve Oswald are in the typical spot atop the patch.

Foale’s third flight, STS-63 in February 1995, was a rendezvous with the Russian space station Mir. The broader Shuttle-Mir partnership — represented by a program patch showing the Shuttle docked to Mir — marked a new phase of cooperation between NASA and Russia. By then, women were sufficiently integrated that there was no distinction on the logo for Eileen Collins, the first female Shuttle pilot. Discovery did not dock with Mir, but Foale would get a closer view of it when he was chosen as the second NASA astronaut to stay aboard Mir as a crew member. This required a flight into space as part of STS-84 in May 1997 and a return on STS-86 that September.

Foale did not return to space until STS-103 in December 1999 for a Hubble Space Telescope servicing mission, made possible by the efforts of Sullivan and others to replace many built-in systems with modular ones during the delays following Challenger.

Foale’s sixth and last mission was affected by another Shuttle tragedy. After he was named commander of Expedition 8 to the under-construction International Space Station, the January 2003 loss of the orbiter Columbia and subsequent grounding of the fleet meant a trip aboard Soyuz TMA-3. On the Soyuz crew patch, the cartoon astronauts’ faces are replaced by the colors of the national flags of the U.S., Russia, and Spain.

Sir Michael Foale, CBE, is perhaps the closest counterpart in the second two decades of the Space Age to what John Young was in the first two — the person with one of the widest ranges of spaceflight experience. If you visit the Astronaut Hall of Fame at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, the nine mission patches below his name are the most of any astronaut in the exhibit.

And if you think the degrees of separation among crewmates run from Young to Crippen and Ride to Sullivan to Foale, consider that if not for delays caused by the Challenger disaster, Sullivan would have flown with the Hubble Space Telescope on a mission commanded not by Loren Shriver but by John Young.