A Personal Story...
..."The mission patch for Apollo-15 was basically designed by the Italian dress designer, Emilio Pucci. We had as a crew evaluated some 540 different designs for our crew patch. They appeared either too mechanical or too complicared or to have nothing to do with the flight, so finaly, through a mutual friend, we asked Pucci if he would help us with the design. Now, Pucci, as I best recall, was an aeronautical engineer and had a good feeling for flight. With his artistic nature, we felt that he would be very helpfull in the patch design. He did send us a design which was basically the same as the patch we eventually used, however, the colors were in the normal Pucci blues, purples and green.
We took his design, changed it from a square to a circular patch, made it red, white and blue and put a lunar background behind the three stylized birds that were the major Pucci contribution. The symbology is of three stylized birds flying over the lunar surface, each indicating one of us who were on the flight. The lunar surface behind the patch shows the landing site (next top Hadley Rille at the foot of the Apennine Mountains) and directly behind the stylized birds is a crater formation that spells "15" in Roman Numerals. You can also see from the stylized birds that they fly in formation with one on top and two closer to the lunar surface, indicating those who actualy landed"...
Astronaut Alfred M. Worden in; "All we did was fly to the Moon"
The Artwork
This is the insignia designed for the Apollo 15 lunar landing mission. The circular design features the colors red, white and blue. On the outer portion of the patch a narrow band of blue and a narrow band of red encircle a wider ba nd of white. The large disc in the center of the emblem has red, white and blue symbols of flight, superimposed over an artist's concept of the Apollo 15 Hadley-Apennine landing site of gray tone. The surnames of the three names are centered in the wh ite band at the bottom of the insignia. The Apollo 15 prime crew men are David R. Scott, commander; Alfred M. Worden, command module pilot; and James B. Irwin, lunar module pilot.