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The crew
Designing process
All designs copyright Roscosmos/Spacepatches.nl.
The backup patch. Produced by AB Emblem (left) for ESA Crew Equipment and in Russia by Tsenki (right).
The crew of Soyuz TMA-03M: Don Pettit, Oleg Kononenko and André Kuipers.
Luc's design before the addition of the children's art; the drawing by Alena Gerasimova; the crew of Soyuz TMA-03M clasping hands upon arriving in orbit on December 21, 2011 - the exact scene of their patch.
The patch shows three cosmonaut figures, joining hands as is traditional for Soyuz crews, at the moment of successfully reaching orbit. The name of the spaceship is depicted in large Cyrillic characters and contains some play with letters, some doubling as both a letter and a number. Also, the silhouette of the Soyuz spaceship is part of one of the letters.
Snaking through the design is the constellation of Scorpio, with its mayor star Antares larger than the rest, as Antares is the callsign of the commander of Soyuz TMA-03M. Oleg Kononenko chose a call sign with an 'A' as a reference to his children, twins Andrey and Alise.
At the request of commander Oleg Kononenko, Luc van den Abeelen made a total of seven different proposals in April 2010. In June, the crew stated that they favoured the design that was ultimately chosen. At that time, it was simply an empty square with the red names, the mission number and the blue-to-black background. The children's element (the three cosmonauts) still had to be added.
The three cosmonaut figures and the constellation Scorpio, for which 11-year old Alena Gerasimova from Petrozavodsk, Russia, was credited, were added in late 2010 / early 2011. The design was formerly approved by Roscosmos head Anatoly Perminov on March 9, 2011. On July 27, following the evaluation of the prototypes, production of the flight patches was started. They were completed the next month.
The design was first seen on August 13, 2011, as paper printout of one of the prototypes in Esa photography. The detailed artwork, obtained from internal NASA sources, was published on Collect Space on August 25, 2011. The design was first published by Roscosmos on September 20, 2011.
Back up patch
In action
Other versions
Links
Soyuz TMA-03M at Wikipedia
Soyuz TMA-03M at Spacefacts
Soyuz TMA-03M on CollectSpace
Expedition-30 images at NASA
Expedition-30 images at Energia
Larger images at our Flickr pages.