Soviet Space Patches

[Tal Inbar]

As a space historian and expert on Soviet spaceflight, I like those patches a lot.

Besides, they were given to me by the commander of the Gagarin cosmonaut school (at the time) General, HSU, Klymuck. One patch (Soviet state seal) was given to me by cosmonaut Alexandrov, and he removed it in front of my eyes from an Orlan spacesuit. So, it is authentic....

Anyway, I wanted to show you some real patches, and compare them with the fakes and fantasy patches on the market - many of them manufactured in the US.

Untill now, I didn't see even one authentic patch for sale. So, here we start the tour....

Tal

The patch is made of SILK.

[Tal Inbar]

Note - made like any US patch. No silk. Wrong font.

The correct font, wrong materials.

[Tal Inbar]

Very nice quality.

[Tal Inbar]

Not close to the original

Another fantasy seal patch

This time from Sci-Fi movie "2010 - Odyssey 2"

[Tal Inbar]

Silk.

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These are fakes.

[Tal Inbar]

ZVEZDA (Star, in Russian), manufacturer of spacesuites.

[Tal Inbar]

This is a fake.


http://collectspace.com/resources/patches_soviet.html

I found an article on Collecting Soviet Mission Patches, AFTER I posted my patches here...

Well, worth looking at.

Tal

[Tal Inbar]

Some thinks it was a patch designed for Soyuz cosmonaut in the early 70's. I can not confirm this information. However, this example is NOT Soviet made:

[Tal Inbar]

VERY rare Voskhod patch (picture by Alex Panchenko):

And here is Alexei Leonov with the patch.