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The crew
Designing process
All designs copyright Roscosmos/Spacepatches.nl.
The backup patch. Produced in Russia by Tsenki.
The crew of Soyuz TMA-08M: Chris Cassidy, Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin.
Left: The MAI-logo as taken to Mir and ISS (and stamped aboard both stations) by Pavel Vinogradov. Center: The first design with a candidate children's drawing (an official winner was never chosen for this flight). Right: When the children's competition ended, Jorge added a realistic Soyuz.
In February 2011, the idea to create a patch based on the logo for the Moscow Aviation Institute was first discussed with commander Pavel Vinogradov. Vinogradov is a graduate from the MAI and had carried the logo on both of his previous space flights to Mir and ISS. Instead of simply cutting out the upper left corner of the shield, Erik van der Hoorn made a design in which this circular part became integrated into the overall design, either representing the Sun or Earth with other circles radiating outward.
With the help of Jorge Cartes from Spain, a variety of children's drawings was considered, at one point including two spacewalkers holding a Soyuz. Since a Soyuz spacecraft usually is not the focus of attention during spacewalks, it was decided to have them hold an ISS. Because no good children's drawings of the ISS were available and there was limited space in the patch, the 'M' of Soyuz TMA-08M was used to double as such.
In May 2011, the children's competition was ended by Roscosmos. Also, the crew asked for a version without the flags. Jorge Cartes now prepared a design with a realistically looking Soyuz. Next, Pavel asked to change the overall shape of the patch to that of his earlier Soyuz TMA-8 flight, so that it would pair up with the Expedition-36 patch he had designed, which was based on his earlier Expedition-13 logo. (Pavel's Expedition-36 patch was ultimately rejected by NASA in favor of a design by one of their own artists). To keep the idea of a shield with circles, the TMA-8 shape was rotated 180 degrees.
Finally, Pavel asked to depict the Soyuz in the colors of the Russian flag. The idea was to give each module of the Soyuz spacecraft its own color, but this did not really work. Instead, the Soyuz was made to look like a waving flag, with the American flag used as solar panels.
Final changes included the removal of two of the circles to stay within the maximum amount of colors possible on the embroidery machines as well as a reference to the Soyuz TMA-8 color scheme and to mark the number of orbits (4) it would take this time to reach the ISS. The number of stars in the American flag was brought down to 7 (3-4), refering to the 34th Soyuz flying to the ISS.
In action
Other versions
Links
Soyuz TMA-08M at Wikipedia
Soyuz TMA-08M at Spacefacts
Soyuz TMA-08M on CollectSpace
Expedition-35 images at NASA
Expedition-35 images at Energia
Larger images at our Flickr pages.