Lion Brothers Space Patches

Apollo-era Lion Brothers patch list

The list below attempts to show all known mission patches from the Apollo era manufactured by Lion Brothers. For the purposes of comparison, the center column shows a the plastic backed protoype versions, and the right-hand column shows the equivalent vintage AB Emblem version of each patch.

You will find some of these patches available for sale in my Crew Patches eBay Store.

Lion Brothers Patches

Plastic-backed Prototypes

AB Emblem

Apollo 1

3.5" mission patch

Apollo 7

4" mission patch

Apollo 7 purple variant

4" mission patch

An uncommon variant of the Apollo 7 patch with purple background instead of the usual dark blue.

Apollo 8

4" mission patch

Apollo 9

3.5" mission patch

Apollo 10

4" mission patch

Apollo 11

4" mission patch

This is the standard Lion Brothers version of the Apollo 11 patch. A scarce orange border variant exists as detailed below along with a few further experimental variants that were never distributed.

Apollo 11 "Orange border" variant

4" mission patch

This is a scarce variant generally referred to as the "Orange Border" version. The yellow on the border, beak and claws is replaced by orange thread, and the darker grey/blue detailing on the tail and craters found on the regular version is absent.

Apollo 11 "Orange border" variant prototype

4" mission patch

Apart from the orange border the design of this extremely rare prototype patch is actually identical to the standard Apollo 11 version, with yellow thread used on the beak and claws and blue/grey detailing on the tail and the lunar surface. This means that in total it uses 9 different thread colors as opposed to 8 on the regular orange border version and on the regular yellow border version. It was probably redesigned to use 8 colors before full production began.

Apollo 11

3½" mission patch

This 3½" patch was produced by Lion Brothers to accompany the set of four mission speciality patches detailed below.

Apollo 11 mission speciality patches

3" speciality patches

For the Apollo 11 mission, Lion Brothers produced a set of 3" commemorative patches for NASA to cover the following specialities : Mission Support (shown right), Launch Team, Recovery Fleet, and Bird Watcher. The Bird Watcher patches are by far the most common, with the other three versions fairly rare.

Apollo 11 Commemorative [suspected Lion Brothers]

4" commemorative patch

Judging by the details of the border, this vintage Apollo 11 commemorative patch may have been manufactured by Lion Brothers. I've only ever seen one example so perhaps it was never put into full production.

Apollo 12 pre-hallmark variant

4" mission patch

This is the earlier pre-hallmark version of the Apollo 12 patch with yellow border thread in a horizontal fill pattern.

Apollo 12

4" mission patch

This is the later hallmark version of the Apollo 12 patch with gold border thread.

Hallmark is an upside down "12" in silver thread in the ship's wake.

Apollo 13

Hallmarked 4" mission patch

Hallmark is a "13" in the mane of the closest horse.

Apollo 14

Hallmarked 4" mission patch

Hallmark is an upside down "14" on the moon's surface just beside the star, and is often very difficult to make out as it only consists of a few grey threads.

Apollo 15

Hallmarked 4" mission patch

Hallmark is an upside down "15" in silver thread at the lower edge of the patch above the "D" of Worden.

A variant exists which has gold thread in the border, a thicker red internal border, and the "XV" in dark thread. This would appear to be a prototype version as I've only seen two examples to date.

Apollo 16

Hallmarked 4" mission patch

Hallmark is an upside down "16" in silver thread to the right of the shield beneath the yellow point.

A variant with distinctly orange thread instead of the yellow-orange of the usual version is owned by Andrew Li. This may be a one-off experiment, or just a slightly different color thread spool being used for one or more production runs of the patch.