Test Program Patches

The embroidered patch shown on the right was created for the original prime crew of Jim Irwin and John Bull.

In fact before the tests started Bull developed a severe sinus problem and had to be replaced by his backup, Grumman consulting pilot Gerry Gibbons.

Jim Irwin and Gerry Gibbons were the crew for three 12 hours tests run on May 27, May 29 and June 1, 1968. Glen Kinglsey (another Grumman consulting pilot) and Joe Gagliano (of the MSC Flight Crew Support Division) were the crew of a 10 hour crewed test performed on May 31. During the second series of crewed tests in October and November 1968, Kinglsey and Irwin crewed the first test, Gibbons and Kingsley the second and third tests and Irwin and Gibbons the fourth.

Irwin and Gibbons wore the original embroidered LTA-8 patch on their space suits for the photos shown above which taken prior to some of the tests, although since this was an embroidered patch rather than betacloth it had to be removed for safety purposes prior to the tests themselves.

As the original LTA-8 patches were apparently produced in extremely small numbers it's probably not surprising that virtually all the patches seen on the market are replicas. Presumably the absence of high resolution photos of the original patches when the first of these replicas was produced explains why the details of most of these - in particular the pattern of stars and the colors - are not particularly accurate. Subsequent replicas seem to have copied their designs from the first replica rather than from any original source photos, making the three identified replica varieties produced prior to my own version being extremely similar in appearance to each other.

2TV-1 was a crewed thermal vacuum chamber test of North American Rockwell's Block II Command and Service Module, performed from June 16 to Jun 24, 1968. The mission set out to simulate a complete crewed Apollo space mission as closely as possible in vacuum chamber A at the Manned Spacecraft Center.

The 2TV-1 crew consisted of astronauts Joe Kerwin, Joe Engle and Vance Brand, and during the mission they wore beta cloth versions of the mission emblem as visible in the photo on the right.

However, a limited number of embroidered patches were also produced at the time and these were presented to some of the NASA and North American Rockwell support staff working on the project.

The Skylab Medical Experiments Altitude Test (SMEAT) ran from July to September 1972 to assess the impact of the Skylab environment and scheduled activities on the crew. The 56 day simulation was conducted in a hypobaric chamber.

The SMEAT crew members wore beta cloth patches on their flight suits during the test, as shown in the photo on the left. However, a few embroidered versions of the insignia were apparently produced at the time and distributed to some of those working on the project.

The Lunar Landing Research Vehicles (LLRV) and Lunar Landing Training Vehicles (LLTV) were developed by Bell Aerosystems in order to replicate the flying characteristics of a Lunar Module in lunar descent mode for astronaut training at the MSC in Houston, Texas. A total of three LLTVs were delivered to NASA between 1966 and 1967.

It seems that a commemorative embroidered patch for the LLTV project was produced at around this time.

An example is shown in the picture on the right, on the flight jacket of LLTV training pilot Jere Cobb [photo courtesy of Robert Yowell].