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The crew
Designing process
In the back up patch, the Canadian flag was replaced by an Italian flag for Luca Parmitano. Produced in Russia by Tsenki.
The crew of Soyuz TMA-07M: Tom Marshburn, Roman Romanenko and Chris Hadfield.
Top: Cece showing the Aurora-7 logo to Scott Carpenter in 1962, along with her comments from November 2001. Bottom: a series of simple sketches, made on December 5, 2010, shows how the idea for the patch developed.
Erik about the design:
,,In 2001, I talked to Cece Bibby, the 'mother of all space art', about the designs she had painted on the Mercury capsules back in 1962. She told me some wonderful stories, some of which were later published on her website and used by others for some nice articles. What stood out to everyone, was her wry sense of humor and her love for practical jokes.
One of the biggest surprises she had for me, was that the '7' on Scott Carpenter's Aurora-7 had been blue. Cece explained to me that she was glad she had not painted it red (as I somehow believed it had been), because Aurora turned out to be the name of the ship that had fired the first round in the Russian Revolution. ,,The USSR had a thing about the color red'', she noted.
In 2004, through Spacepatches.nl, I got involved in Luc's Soyuz TMA-4 patch. It looked as if he would also get his hands on TMA-7, so I told Cece that I would try to smuggle a red seven into it. She (and Luc) cheered the idea, but in the end, we never got to design TMA-7. Alex Panchenko would reign the Soyuz patch world from Soyuz TMA-5 to TMA-11.
By that time, Cece had been rediscovered by the space community as the 'Mercury Artist'. With all her new activities and most stories told (and her computer breaking down), we gradually lost contact. Once in a while I would see pictures of her, enjoying herself at space shows, surrounded by her paintings, old friends and new friends. I was very happy to see her happy.
Luc and Spacepatches.nl got back in the Soyuz patch business in late 2008. Soon, together wih Jacques, I found myself somewhat in Cece's footsteps, designing a logo for a real spaceflight: Roman Romanenko's Soyuz TMA-15. We had planned to use a Soyuz rocket in it, but eventually, it had to make place for a piece of children's art - an angel.
In late 2010, Roman was assigned a second flight and it happened to be Soyuz TMA-07M. The launch was scheduled for 2012; 50 years since Cece had decorated Friendship-7, Aurora-7 and Sigma-7. I instantly knew I would use her artwork and a red seven as a starting point for the design. Very early in the sketching process, I discovered that a Soyuz rocket would fit in nicely... and the pieces of the puzzle fell together.
The crew approved the logo in the Summer of 2011 without requesting any changes. It was revealed on Twitter on July 31, 2012, by Chris Hadfield. Unfortunately, I was unable to share with Cece the news of 'her' red 7 making it into Earth orbit aboard a Russian spaceship. She was already ill when I started designing the patch. She died on November 14, 2012, a month before the launch. She was 84 years old."
All designs copyright Roscosmos/TsPK/Spacepatches.nl.
Back up patch
In action
Other versions
Links
Soyuz TMA-07M at Wikipedia
Soyuz TMA-07M at Spacefacts
Soyuz TMA-07M on CollectSpace
Expedition-34 images at NASA
Expedition-34 images at Energia
Larger images at our Flickr pages.