[HN Gopher] 60 Years of Spaceflight Patches
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60 Years of Spaceflight Patches
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 42 points
Date : 2025-01-02 13:52 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| a1o wrote:
| 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.
| navbaker wrote:
| 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.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| I was hoping this was going to be about patches to code.
| diggan wrote:
| 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.
| mavhc wrote:
| 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
| dylan604 wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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!
| sandworm101 wrote:
| 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.
| dano wrote:
| Had to dig around to find this
| https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1197/1
| anticorporate wrote:
| 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.
| hipsterstal1n wrote:
| 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!
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(page generated 2025-01-05 23:00 UTC)