Charles “Pete” Conrad
Paul Weitz
Joseph Kerwin

Frank Kelly Freas

The Skylab crew 1 patch was designed by Frank Kelly Freas, a well known artist highly regarded in the science fiction field. He wrote an article describing his experience of designing the patch, “Skylab Patchwork,” which was published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact magazine.

Freas specifically optimized his design for the embroidery process, and it shows. This is perhaps the only patch that looks better in the embroidered version than it does in the original artwork. Notice how the sunburst is depicted in discrete steps, not in continuous gradations: this is exactly what is needed for embroidery and silk-screenining. As he mentions in his article, and as is evident in the artwork, lettering was not his strong suit. One striking oddity is the extra-wide black outer border — this is not something than can be easily accomplished in a standard embroidered patch, and in fact none of the embroidered versions incorporate this feature.

Freas did a wonderful job of avoiding overdone symmetry by placing all the main elements (the sun, the Earth and the Skylab spacecraft) off-center — each one independent, and none of them in the center of the patch.

It is interesting and curious that the artwork was not re-done by the MSC art department to produce “camera-ready” art, common practice at the time.