Frank Borman
James Lovell
William Anders

James Lovell

William Bradley

The Apollo 8 patch is elegant in its simplicity and brilliant in its eloquence. According to Apollo 8 crewmember Jim Lovell:

Borman and I were in California working on our Apollo spacecraft when we got word that our mission had changed. We were going to take McDivitt’s spacecraft and make a circumlunar flight around the moon.

“On the way back to Houston the next evening, Frank was flying the airplane, and since I had nothing to do, I sort of sketched out what I thought would be an appropriate patch. After I returned to Houston I gave my sketches to the NASA artist who made the final drawing.

It sounds as if the design sprang fully-formed from Lovell’s brain, like Athena from the brow of Zeus; but the story is not that simple.

In the original plan of missions, Apollo 8 was to be a test of the lunar module in Earth orbit, and Apollo 9 was to test the lunar module in cislunar space. The crew originally slated for Apollo 8 was Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott and Rusty Schweickart, while the crew slated for Apollo 9 was Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders. A patch design by Allen Stevens, the artist responsible for the earlier Apollo 1 and Apollo 7 patches, had been chosen by the (then) Apollo 9 crew. It depicted three horses enclosed in a CM-shaped triangle, overlaying an American flag. Stevens had previously created several designs incorporating the CM shape among his proposals for the Apollo 7 patch, so this was just a case of recycling a design element he felt had merit. That the patch had actually been selected by Borman’s Apollo 9 crew is supported by the fact that it had been photographed, and assigned an official NASA MSC photo ID (S68-53480).

Lovell flew twice during the Gemini program, as pilot on Gemini 7, and as command pilot on Gemini 12. Around the time of these flights, a number of documents from MSC’s Mission Planning and Analysis Division (MPAD) were published which carried a curious emblem on the cover. This emblem has a unique and prescient image as its central design element — a simplified, abstracted version of a trajectory around the Earth and the moon. It is an almost exact representation of the central image of the Apollo 8 patch. MPAD played a crucial role in devoloping the techniques of every manned space flight in this period, and it is almost unthinkable that Lovell would not have encountered some of these documents.

(Consider also that when Lovell later saw Lumen Winter’s mural of three galloping horses during a trip to New York city, he was compelled to base his Apollo 13 patch on that design motif. He was clearly influenced, if only subconsciously, by the earlier design of Allen Stevens which featured three horses.)

When it became apparent that the Lunar Module was not going to be ready for a flight in 1968, it was decided to remanifest the two missions: Apollo 8 would take just the CSM into lunar orbit, while Apollo 9 would test the LM in Earth orbit. The two crews were swapped. It was then that Lovell sketched the patch. The MPAD emblem may have been in the far recesses of Lovell’s mind when he conceived the central part of the design; regardless, that element clearly fit nicely into the CM shape from Stevens’ design which was currently the crew’s patch, even though not publicly announced.