November 14 - 24, 1969
CSM Yankee Clipper, LM Intrepid
A Personal Story...
..."The patch was designed by Pete, Dick and I with the help of about 10 other people around the contractor area at the Cape. The real breakthrough came in our effort to try to duplicate our landing site on the moon when a couple of engineers came to me and said they thought they could duplicate it exactly. They came back a few days later and it did look just perfect - all the craters the proper size, shape and the lighting just perfect. It turned out the technique they had used was to get a relief globe of the moon that was in the library and light it properly and then take photographs with a polaroid at different distances until they got one that had just the right curvature that we wanted on the patch. We selected the blue and gold because they are Navy colors and all of us were in the Navy. The ship was patterned in a way after a Navy ship. I went to the libary and picked up some clipper ship pictures, gave them to an artist who was working at Patrick at the time. He was the one who drew it. After looking it over, we realized there were too many sets of sails outboard of the hull, so we asked him to redesign it. The ship had been one similar to the one Jason and the Argonauts had used to search for the Golden Fleece and we didn't feel that was American enough, where we felt that the clipper ship was definitely an American symbol"...
Alan L. Bean in; "All we did was fly to the Moon"
..."There were four stars on the patch of Apollo-12, one for each of the crewmen and one for C.C. Williams who would have been the lunar module Pilot on this flight had he lived.(*) Al Bean had replaced C.C. as Lunar Module Pilot, and it had been his idea to put the extra star there"...
(*) C.C. Williams died October 5, 1967 in the crash of his T-38 jet near Tallahassee, Florida.
From: "First on the Moon" by Little, Brown & Company.
The Crew
The Apollo-12 Crewmembers are astronauts; Charles Conrad Jr., commander; Richard F. Gordon Jr., command module pilot; and Alan L. Bean, lunar module pilot.
The Artwork
This is the official crew insignia for Apollo 12, the United States
second lunar landing mission. The clipper ship signifies that the crew is
all Navy and symbolically relates the era of the clipper ship to the era
of space flight. As the clipper ship brought foreign shores closer to the
United States and marked the increased utilization of the seas by this
nation, Spacecraft have opened the way to the other planets and Apollo 12
marks the increased utilization of space-based on knowledge gained in
earlier missions. The portion of the moon shown is representative of the
Ocean of Storms are a in which Apollo 12 will land.
Lion Brothers
Above the Lion Brothers Apollo-12 patch. There is (photographic) evidence that the Apollo-12 crew has worn LB Apollo-12 patches on their Biological Isolation Garments. LB produced one internal document dated 11/11/69 for the Apollo-12 patch with a typed notation on it stating "This design is made exclusive for NASA." It is not know that LB was contracted by NASA to create the Apollo-12 patch. The LB Apollo-12 hallmark, an upside down "12" in contrail behind ship, see below.
Related Patch
