Apollo 17 Mission Patch

Apollo 17 Mission Patch

Apollo 17 Commander, Eugene Cernan, commissioned well renowned space artist Robert McCall to design the patch for the last Moon landing of the Apollo program. The crew wanted the patch to convey the themes of mankind, country, and future.

McCall based his image of Apollo on the Apollo Belvedere sculpture – one of the most well-known classical representations of the Greek god. The seven-foot Roman sculpture is displayed in the Vatican museum. McCall transformed this image of Apollo from white marble to gold, so that it represented the ‘golden age’ of spaceflight.

Behind Apollo, a simple eagle with red stripes symbolises the United States, with the three white stars representing the three astronauts. The eagle’s wing overlaps the Moon to show that it has been visited by mankind already. Apollo and the eagle’s gaze are directed towards Saturn and a spiral galaxy, to suggest that the future of human space exploration lay far beyond the Moon. At the time the crew would have found it hard to imagine that theirs was the last human space journey to venture so far.

Web resources

• A History of Crew Patches