Mission Insignia
The oval insignia shows a gold NASA Astronaut Pin, given to U.S. astronauts upon completing their first space flight, traveling from the Earth to the Moon. A gold band around the edge includes the mission and astronaut names. The designer was Jean Beaulieu.
The backup crew spoofed the patch with its own version, with revised artwork showing a Wile E. Coyote cartoon character depicted as gray-bearded (for Shepard, who was 47 at the time of the mission and the oldest man on the Moon), pot bellied (for Mitchell, who had a pudgy appearance) and red furred (for Roosa's red hair), still on the way to the moon, while Road Runner (for the backup crew) is already on the moon, holding a U.S. flag and a flag labeled "1st Team". The flight name is replaced by "BEEP BEEP" and the backup crew's names are given. Several of these patches were hidden by the backup crew and found during the flight by the crew in notebooks and storage lockers in both the CSM Kitty Hawk and the LM Antares spacecraft, and one patch was even stored on the MET lunar hand cart.
Read more about this topic: Apollo 14
Famous quotes containing the word mission:
“Man is eminently a storyteller. His search for a purpose, a cause, an ideal, a mission and the like is largely a search for a plot and a pattern in the development of his life story—a story that is basically without meaning or pattern.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)