Mercury 7 Commemorative Mission Patch

Mercury 7 Commemorative Mission Patch

This Mercury patch was produced by the American company A-B Emblem to commemorate the flight of Mercury 7 - a mission that saw Scott Carpenter travel into space in 1962.

Like all Mercury patches, this patch was designed after the mission and is not an official design. Mission patches only began to be designed and worn by American astronauts for spaceflight from Gemini 5 onwards. A-B Emblems created these commemorative patches to mark the significance of the Mercury missions. A-B Emblem began work with NASA in the 1960s, before signing an exclusive contract to produce official patches for spaceflight missions in 1970. This particular patch was made in the 1970s and shows a Mercury vehicle above Earth, with the name Aurora emblazoned across it.

Although this patch was not designed by Scott Carpenter, he did name his spacecraft Aurora 7, continuing the Mercury naming convention of including the number 7 in the name. It is widely believed that this was to honour the Mercury 7 - the first group of American astronauts. However, Carpenter has claimed that the first Mercury astronaut, Alan Shepard, named his spacecraft Freedom 7 only because it was the seventh spacecraft of the Mercury line - something which Carpenter claimed the rest of the astronauts went along with, never correcting the misconception.