Apollo 11 Moon Landing Mission Patch

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins kept their own names off the Apollo 11 emblem on purpose, so it would stand for everyone who worked toward the first lunar landing. Collins drew the design. Jim Lovell suggested the bald eagle, the national bird, and simulator instructor Tom Wilson suggested an olive branch to say the mission came in peace. Even the lettering was thought through: Armstrong wanted the numeral 11 rather than the word eleven, so people who did not read English could understand it. The crew wore that emblem when they launched in July 1969.

Apollo 11 launched from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center on July 16, 1969, on a Saturn V. The lunar module Eagle touched down in the Sea of Tranquility on July 20 at 20:17 UTC, while Collins stayed in lunar orbit aboard the command module Columbia. Armstrong and Aldrin spent about two and a half hours outside on the surface and gathered 47.5 pounds of lunar samples. Columbia splashed down in the North Pacific on July 24, and the crew was picked up by the carrier USS Hornet. Armstrong named the landing site Tranquility Base on the radio, and it has carried that name ever since.

This is a round patch, 2.5 inches across, with a yellow merrowed border around a thin ring of blue. A bald eagle with brown wings and a white head comes down onto a gray, cratered lunar surface, talons out, holding a green olive branch. Early sketches put the branch in the eagle's beak, but Bob Gilruth, director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, thought the bare talons looked too warlike, so the branch moved to the claws. The blue and white Earth hangs in the black sky at the upper left, and APOLLO 11 arcs across the top in gold. It has a sew-on backing, made to be stitched down by hand or machine.

Eagle was also the lunar module's call sign, so "The Eagle has landed" and this emblem have always gone together. The landing met the goal set in 1961 of putting a man on the Moon and bringing him home safely before the decade was out. The engineers, flight controllers, technicians and recovery crews behind it were the people the crew had in mind when they left their names off.

It fits a shadow box next to a July 1969 newspaper front page, or a photo of the family gathered around the television that night. It is also a good gift for a grandchild hearing the Moon landing story for the first time, or for someone who worked on Apollo. One eagle, one olive branch, and the first landing on another world.