1969 Apollo 11 Logo-Design Archive
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APPRAISER:
My dad worked for NASA during the space race, and he was a technical illustrator, but every once in a while he got to do something fun, and when Michael Collins came to him and said, "We want a mission patch for Apollo 11," that's what he came up with.
APPRAISER:
Michael Collins, who was the pilot for the Apollo 11 mission, came up with kind of the original germ of the design, the concept of the design.
GUEST:
Michael Collins said what they want is the eagle, you know, landing on the moon, so he said, "I want an eagle in it, and I want the moon, and I want the earth in the background." They sent it to Washington and they said, "that's really almost perfect," and he goes, "Almost?" He says, "Yeah, except for the talons." He said, "We come in peace, we want a friendly eagle." He goes, "It's a bird of prey." So then what he did is came up with the final one, put the olive branch in the talons, he made it as friendly as he could make it, and that's what they wore to the moon.
APPRAISER:
Now in Michael Collins' autobiography, he talks about the creation of the patch. He talks about looking up different pictures of birds and trying to find a bald eagle, and he found a picture of a bald eagle coming in for a landing with the talons extended, and he thought, it's coming in for a landing, that's a really cool image. And so he took some tracing paper and drew over the eagle, and said, "This is the version that I like," and he later commented on it, once they moved the olive branch down to the feet, he's like, "Well, I hope he drops the olive branch before he comes in for his landing." It looks like that these are the exact same painting. Do you know, did he paint in oils or watercolor?
GUEST:
I believe it was in oil. This are the same paintings. What he did was he painted over, so when he painted over the talons and the olive branch, he took a picture of it before he changed it, and as far as I know, this is the only photograph of this version of it. I mean there may be one at NASA but I've never seen one.
APPRAISER:
Now, right here we have the final version of the patch with the friendlier eagle…
GUEST:
Yeah.
APPRAISER:
…the olive branch in the claws, signed by Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin. Have you ever had these evaluated?
GUEST:
I never have. My dad, he's retired and actually, you know, living in a retirement area, and about four or five years ago, he started sending me stuff, and so I've just got stacks of the stuff, and I just pulled these out and brought them to the Roadshow to see what you guys thought.
APPRAISER:
Well, having the photograph of your father actually working on the piece, having a signed photograph of the final version of the Apollo patch, we give a fair auction estimate of around $3,000 to $5,000 for this collection.
GUEST:
Wow, wow, thank you very much. That's amazing.
APPRAISER:
The big question is, does your father still have the original painting?
GUEST:
He doesn't know where it is, doesn't know where it is.
APPRAISER:
Wow.
GUEST:
Uh, yeah, after 40, 50 years...
APPRAISER:
Well, because if we look closely on this one, you can see a couple of little changes. The A from the “APOLLO” and a couple of letters were moved slightly over and painted over. There's some other little changes here and there where you can see some overpainting done, so it'd be really fascinating to see how many other minor tweaks and changes were made over the design of the patch. If we could find the original art for that, we estimate, at auction, it would be between $20,000 and $30,000.
GUEST:
Seriously? Wow, wow, unbelievable. Wow, I never thought, but that's amazing.
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