posted 09-23-2013 12:37 PM               

This was triggered by seeing a pair of grey and blue Apollo ARIA patches sold recently on eBay.

After doing some research I managed to talk to Capt David J. Dunn who had the original patches produced back in 1970 and who kindly provided some scans and photos of some of those vintage patches.

One surprising conclusion of this research is that no blue versions were produced at the time of the Apollo project, and the grey versions sold alongside them in several auctions are not a match for the vintage original grey versions either. I now suspect that the blue and grey patches were produced together as replicas in the 1990s or early 2000s, with Randy Hunt being an obvious candidate as the maker.

The only apparently genuine vintage example I've found an image of so far on the net - one that matches the originals owned by Capt. Dunn - is that posted by Jacques on his old site in the link above.

posted 10-11-2013 01:22 PM               

My theory is that maybe these patches were produced by someone on the ARIA project after Capt. Dunn left it (in 1972) i.e. during the Skylab or ASTP years (1973-1975). This would explain why he never saw them during his time on the project.

I still have my doubts about the two patches sold at Aurora in 2006 (and the possibility that replicas were made) but the images from the auction are not clear enough to be conclusive.