Skylab 3 Mission Patch Emphasized Earth, Sun and Medical Themes

Summary: The Skylab 3 mission patch emphasized Earth, sun and medical themes in its iconography and the United States flag’s red, white and blue in its colors.

Patriotic colors of red, white and blue intentionally predominate in the Skylab 3 mission patch; a communications snafu caused the designations of Skylab's three manned missions (Skylab 2, 3, 4) without inclusion of the space station's launch (Skylab 1) into the numbering scheme: Public Domain, via NASA History

The Skylab 3 mission patch emphasized Earth, sun and medical themes in its iconography and honored the red, white and blue of the United States flag in its main color scheme.

The Skylab 3 mission launched Saturday, July 28, 1973, at 11:10:50 Coordinated Universal Time (7:10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time), as NASA’s second manned mission to Skylab, the first United States space station. The mission ended 59 days later, with splashdown Tuesday, Sept. 25, at 22:19:51 UTC (6:19 p.m. EDT) in the northeastern Pacific Ocean.

The patch’s design centered on an adaptation of a circa 1490 drawing, known as Vitruvian Man (L’Uomo Vitruviano), by Italian Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci (April 15, 1452-May 2, 1519). The artistic genius used the medium of pen and ink with wash over metalpoint on paper for his famous depiction of a nude male figure.

The drawing presents the male in two superimposed positions. The superimposition yields an eight-limbed figure of four arms and four legs sharing a head and torso. A square inscribes one position, in which the figure in closed leg stance and with arms outstretched at shoulder height. A circle circumscribes the other position, in which the figure’s legs are splayed and his outstretched arms rise above his shoulders.

The Skylab 3 mission pilot, Jack Robert Lousma (born Feb. 29, 1936), explained for Richard L. “Dick” Lattimer’s 1983 spaceflight history, All We Did Was Fly to the Moon, that the Vitruvian Man represented the mission’s “medical aspects.” Lousma noted that the patch’s illustration of Vitruvian Man modified Leonardo’s original drawing for “family viewing” suitability.

Leonardo’s drawing also features blank space within the circle and the square. Contrastingly, the Skylab 3 mission patch colored the enclosed space with a solar half and an Earth half.

Red represented the solar half, with a yellow orange flare. Lousma shared that the patch’s flare outlined the shapes of flares that the mission’s scientist-pilot, Owen Kay Garriott (Nov. 22, 1930-April 15, 2019), had extensively analyzed prior to his selection in 1965 as one of NASA’s first six scientist-astronomers.

From 1961 through 1965, Garriott taught and conducted research in ionospheric physics as assistant, and then associate, professor at his alma mater, California’s Stanford University. (Solar radiation ionizes the ionosphere by negatively or positively charging the layer’s atoms and molecules. NASA places the ionosphere’s stretch from approximately 48 kilometers, or 30 miles, above Earth’s surface to “the edge of space,” at about 965 kilometers, or 600 miles.) Garriott co-authored, with Stanford University colleagues Aldo V. da Rosa, Michael J. Davis and O.G. (Oswald Garrison) Villard Jr., “Solar Flare Effects in the Ionosphere,” a study of the solar flares of Monday, May 21, and Tuesday, May 23, 1967, published in the Dec. 1, 1967, issue of JGR Journal of Geophysical Research.

The patch’s Earth half backdropped the eight-limbed figure’s left side. The North and South American continents, depicted as silvery off-white land masses shaded with blue-gray topographical stretches, interrupt the blue vastness of the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Southern Ocean possibly lies between Skylab 3 man’s two left feet.

Elena Passarello, assistant professor of English at Oregon State University, devoted a chapter to the Skylab 3 mission’s most popular experimentee, common cross spider (Araneus diadematus) Arabella, in her 2017 bestiary, Animals Strike Curious Poses. Passarello ended her tribute to Arabella with a description of the Skylab 3 mission patch’s “take on Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.” She saw the patch’s central figure as reaching out “with all eight of his appendages” (page 170). Perhaps the patch’s eight-limbed figure also could have suggested the eight-legged Arabella, dubbed in the chapter’s opening Reuters’ quote as “. . . in many ways . . . Skylab’s star performer” (page 158).

The Skylab 3 mission patch designated the mission as Skylab II. In Homesteading Space (2008), co-written by spaceflight historian William David Hitt (born Aug. 7, 1975) with Skylabbers Owen Garriott and Joseph Peter “Joe” Kerwin (born Feb. 19, 1932), the discrepancy is attributed to scrapped plans for designating the space station’s three manned missions as 1, 2 and 3, by excluding the space station’s orbital launch, Monday, May 14, 1973.

The takeaways for Skylab 3 mission patch’s emphasis on Earth, sun and medical themes are that the primarily tri-colored patch honored the red, white and blue colors of the United States flag; that a communications snafu accounted for the mission’s designation as Skylab II instead of Skylab 3; and that the eight-limbed Vitruvius Man could have suggested the mission's most popular experimentee, Arabella, who spun the first made-in-space web as the one of the first two spiders in space.

First two spiders in space were common cross spiders (Araneus diadematus) Arabella (left), who spun first made-in-space web, and Anita (right), second spider to form a web in space; Lee B. Summerlin, ed., Skylab, Classroom in Space (1977), page 44: Public Domain, via NASA NTRS (NASA Technical Report Server)

Acknowledgment

My special thanks to talented artists and photographers/concerned organizations who make their fine images available on the internet.

Image credits:

Patriotic colors of red, white and blue intentionally predominate in the Skylab 3 mission patch; a communications snafu caused the designations of Skylab's three manned missions (Skylab 2, 3, 4) without inclusion of the space station's launch (Skylab 1) into the numbering scheme: Public Domain, via NASA History @ https://www.history.nasa.gov/skylab_patches.html

First two spiders in space were common cross spiders (Araneus diadematus) Arabella (left), who spun first made-in-space web, and Anita (right), second spider to form a web in space; Lee B. Summerlin, ed., Skylab, Classroom in Space (1977), page 44: Public Domain, via NASA NTRS (NASA Technical Report Server) @ https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19770022245.pdf

For further information:

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Available via Wiley Online American Geophysical Union (AGU) publications @ https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/JZ072i023p06099

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Available via Google Books @ https://books.google.com/books/about/Homesteading_Space.html?id=sR5Cm_zeIekC

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