NASA Apollo 11 Beta Cloth Patch Insignia

These patches were printed in 1969 for the Apollo 11 mission. After the tragic Apollo 1 launch pad fire that killed 3 astronauts, NASA decided to work on removing all flammable materials from the spacecraft cabin. A new material was designed for use as the outer layer of space suits made of teflon-coated fiberglass. This cloth was called Beta cloth and is still widely used for space suits and missions to this day. By Apollo 7 even the embroidered patches, insignias, and name tags were replaced with screen printed Beta cloth patches. These patches were production prints and/or test runs to align the screen printing layers. If you look closely, you can see some of the colors are misaligned. They were obtained from the company that manufactured the special inks used in this process. These patches would have been stitched onto the astronaut's suits and coveralls as shown in the image.