Perhaps the best thing about NASA’s military provenance is that the agency picked up the armed services’ habit of making patches.

The patches above were drawn and worn by the wives of the astronauts on those respective missions. They are nearly identical to the actual patches, but the central figure is a woman instead of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Virtruvian Man.

The Stephen Colbert patch commemorating the treadmill that sort of bears his name on the International Space Station combines the new photorealistic style with the line drawings of older patches.

Older mission patches tend to be more iconographic than their contemporary counterparts. The sailing ship of the Apollo 12 mission patch played on the golden age of exploration on Earth.

NASA hasn’t shied away from using well-known figures on its patches in recent years. In 2003, Daffy Duck and Marvin Martian made appearances on two patches for Mars Exploration Rover missions. 

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were featured on a patch for the Multi-Purpose Logistics Model of the International Space Station. Why? Three of the four modules of the MPLM shared their names with the famous “heroes in a half shell.” (Turtle Power!)

While some early mission patches reached artistically, other mission artists were more conservative. The Gemini 5 patch above, is just a simple covered wagon, presumably to represent that its wearers were pioneers in space.

Most shuttle mission patches used the shuttle itself as the dominant theme. Perhaps as a result, most of them are pretty boring.

But unofficial patches produced during the shuttle era could be quite stunning. The Hubble Huggers patch was created for scientists and space officials who wanted to push for Hubble’s repair in the troubled early days of the mission. 

Patches created for shuttle missions to Mir usually display an excellent mix of American and Russian heroic tropes. Here, we see a patch from NASA 6/Mir 24 mission where Mir acts as the hammer of the traditional Communist symbol, the hammer and sickle.

It’s not just astronauts that get patches. This nurse’s patch was sent in to Wired Science by Sam Crowe , a member of the Space Nursing Society, “an international space advocacy organization devoted to space nursing and the contribution to space exploration by Registered Nurses.”

But we love the simple patch art best because it acts as a kind of Rorschach test about your beliefs in space exploration. This Skylab patch seems like a coded transmission from Earthlings to the Universe and the best part of it is: No one can say for sure what the actual message is.

NASA’s Most Awesomely Weird Mission Patches