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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-06M: Kevin Ford, Oleg Novitskiy and Evgeni Tarelkin.
The drawing by Evgeni Tarelkin, a first adaptation by Luc and one of the embroidered prototypes with a gold instead of a blue border.
The Spacepatches.nl team started exploring ideas with Soyuz TMA-06M commander Oleg Novitskiy in February 2011. The initial sketch for what would become the flight patch, was made by Evgeni Tarelkin in December 2011. The design was finalized in the following months by Luc van den Abeelen.
The artwork was approved by TsPK and Roscosmos op April 12, 2012. The original design had a black border. Production of prototypes (3 rounds to try out several border colors at the request of the crew) started May 11, 2012. Production of flight patches started May 30, 2012.
The patch artwork was first published by CollectSpace on June 19, 2012. Due to the late addition of a colored border, the lower red stripe in the US flag is not present on all versions of the artwork that have been released by various sources.
The description of the patch:
The Soyuz TMA-06M patch features the spacecraft on final approach to docking with the International Space Station. The solar panels of the orbital facility are shaped to depict the Roman numerals XXXIII, for the 33rd expedition that this crew joins up with.
The colours of the comet under the name of Tarelkin, white and red, are a reference to the seal of the City of Dmitrov, where he was born. The red and green one under Novitskiy's name represent the flag of Belarus, where the commander was born. Astronaut Ford's name is underlined by a blue comet and a yellow star, featured in the flag of his home state of Indiana.
Back up patch
In action
Other versions
Links
Soyuz TMA-06M at Wikipedia
Soyuz TMA-06M at Spacefacts
Soyuz TMA-06M on CollectSpace
Expedition-33 images at NASA
Expedition-33 images at Energia
Larger images at our Flickr pages.