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Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

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    Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

    Damn limited number of characters in subject field bastard.

    Alternative thread title: In Soviet Russia, Space Travels Into You.

    Anyway, as requested, here we are. And it's a bit of a disappointment to be honest - considering that graphic design was not one of the Soviet Union's weaker points, these Vostok and Soyuz insignia really aren't as spectacular as you might hope. Perhaps the Russians had a little more taste than the Japanese cartoon / prog album cover lunatics employed by NASA, but some of these are a little... sedate. I've had to trawl to find the half-decent ones.

    I mean look, here's the logo for Vostok 1, Yuri Gagarin's pioneering flight, and it's shit:



    Kind of like the crest of a third-tier Georgian football club, except not even they would build the whole thing around a huge downward arrow, for fuck's sake.

    Vostok 2 is even worse, like a cub scout badge for rocketry:



    The first good one comes from Vostok 5 and 6. It feels pretty "Russian", but it's got an interesting mid-80s red and grey colour scheme, and seems to suggest the rockets are taking off from a world that wasn't worth staying on in the first place, made up of useless bits of rubble and, on the far right, toilet wall graffiti of an ejaculating penis.

    Voskhod 1, in common with many of the Soviet mission patches, seems to be under the impression that it represents a manned mission to the sun, which not even the Russians were sloppy enough to take a chance on. It sort of looks like it should be on the label of a bottle of lager, but it's pretty good, and Voskhod 1 did, supposedly, carry on board a bit of cloth torn off a communard banner from the 1871 Paris Commune, which cannot be said of any of NASA's efforts.

    Voskhod 2. LOL. I presume this is supposed to represent would-have-been-first-man-on-moon Alexey Leonov, who pulled off the first-ever spacewalk on this mission, but it looks more like The Adventures Of Astro-Man. Sorry, Cosmo-Man.

    Soyuz 1 - for the last time, you're not going to the fucking sun. The sun is too hot, get it? Tooooo hoooooot. Like the Apollo 7 logo with the thousand-mile trail of flame behind the command module, this is the kind of mission insignia that could make your pilot pull of his helmet, leave the launch pad and just keep walking. Which in this case he probably should have done, as he never made it back (though not because he crashed into the sun, to be fair).

    Soyuz 3 was another failed mission - albeit non-fatal, which is surprising, if they did indeed send an aeroplane into space.

    They also fucked up the Soyuz 6-7-8 joint mission, but not as badly as they fucked up the mission insignia for Soyuz 6. Only the Soviets could imagine that a fucking welder was a suitably exciting image to represent a journey into outer space. I think it's a welder, anyway. Whatever, it's a load of crap.

    After losing the race to the moon, the Russians tried to salvage a bit of pride with solid, dependable, extremely Russian insignia like those of Soyuz 9, Soyuz 10 and the too-boring-to-link to Soyuz 11. This went on for a while, with even the logo for the Apollo-Soyuz test project being unimaginative and grimly corporate.

    Things picked up slightly in 1978 with Soyuz 28, a rip-off of the Open University logo with really nice late-70s Eastern Bloc colouring, like the walls of a guest house in Donetsk. Putting Czechs on board, by the way, was an attempt to chill out people like Vaclav Havel and his troublemaker mates. "We let your people go... into space! What the fuck's your problem?" Identical badges followed, for missions including Poles, Bulgarians, Hungarians, Romanians, East Germans - and eventually Vietnamese, Cubans and Mongolians. How little we hear these days of Jugderdemidiin Gurragchaa, the first Mongolian in space.

    They altered the design when they took a Frenchman up, but not enough to make it worth linking to. However, the thing they knocked up for Soyuz T-11, a Russo-Indian mission, is pretty out of it.

    The Eighties is a bit bleak as far as interesting mission insignia go, apart from Soyuz TM-7, whose patch is genuinely hilarious. Hiya!

    It took the fall of Communism to inspire the next halfway-interesting patch, in the shape of this charmingly naive image for Soyuz TM-16, which appears to have blasted off out of a volcano, and seems charmingly unaware of its phallic overtones. Russia showed it was moving with the times with Soyuz TM-19, launched in the early 90s with a logo clearly modelled on the kind of hessian bags Fair-Tradey girls carried over their shoulders at the time.

    After that, they get kind of messy and boring, until the alarming Soyuz TM-23, which appears to show MIR jumping on the Space Shuttle's back and pushing it into the sun, Soyuz TM-24, which seems to have chosen... shall we say, an unorthodox location from which to lift off, and the blast from the past that was this nostalgically Soviet image for Soyuz TM-26.

    I'm not going on any further, as they get less interesting, and I want a bowl of cornflakes before I go to bed. Knock yourselves out.

    #2
    Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

    Superb post.

    Soyuz 10 has surprising Star Trek overtones.

    Comment


      #3
      Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

      Only the Soviets could imagine that a fucking welder was a suitably exciting image to represent a journey into outer space.
      I love the way the welder guy has a protective mask. Which he's not using. And is redundant anyway, because his space suit has its own protective visor.

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        #4
        Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

        Oh, and the blatant phallic overtones of the Soyuz TM16 insignia remind me of the Oriental Pearl Tower in Shanghai in that they couldn't possibly have not realised what they were doing. The tower was built next to a building with a globe on either side (or vice versa - not sure which building came first). You can only see one of them from this angle, but you get the idea:

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          #5
          Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

          What a good idea this was!

          Cosmos-Man does indeed cross the line from kosmik into komik, but I think he's my favourite.

          That's not a welder - he's prospecting for moongold or spacedust or something, blatantly.

          Soyuz 11 is the logo in some sci-fi thing, I swear down.

          I do feel slightly guilty that you were up until half past four in the morning (there's a half past four in the morning now?) doing this though.

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            #6
            Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

            Brilliant stuff, and I did LOL at the toilet-wall ejaculating penis.

            Love Vostok 2 and Cosmos-Man.

            Makes me nostalgic for Moscow and the VKND space park, you can see Gregarin's capsule there.

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              #7
              Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

              To be fair, a computer running MS Paint would have been a technological marvel when Vostok 5 was launched.

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                #8
                Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

                "Which in this case he probably should have done, as he never made it back (though not because he crashed into the sun, to be fair)."

                Well, the good news was Soyoz 1 made it back to earth. The bad news was it was without a parachute.

                Of course I loved all of these better than all of the Apollos. Great job, mission commander.

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                  #9
                  Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

                  sw2boro wrote:
                  I do feel slightly guilty that you were up until half past four in the morning (there's a half past four in the morning now?) doing this though.
                  Don't worry, I was up anyway.

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                    #10
                    Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

                    I really like Vostok 5/6. I don't know why. But I think that, too, would look great as a beer bottle label.

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                      #11
                      Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

                      That's an interesting point, but it's telling that the really hubristic yanqui stuff comes right at the end of the Apollo programme. Before then it was still "Wagons west!" (see that ridiculous badge late in the other thread), or overexcited mad lunar modules with enormous afterburner flames and square-riggers in space. If the commies had made it to the moon first it's pretty safe to say that the insignium for their 5th mission there will have erred on the side of triumphalism.

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                        #12
                        Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

                        It isn't quite on topic but the Soviet space program is the cause of my absolute favourite piece of public architecture.

                        I present to you

                        "To the Conquerors of Space"





                        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mo...s_of_Space.jpg

                        http://static-p4.fotolia.com/jpg/00/...UfSo4gy7HP.jpg

                        http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...x_sep_2008.jpg

                        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monumen...erors_of_Space

                        I think the space race was worth it just for this.

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                          #13
                          Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

                          I've always loved that thing. I'd like to go and see it one day.

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                            #14
                            Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

                            Crap. Didn't see that when I was in Moscow. Hopefully I'll be going to a conference there next year.

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                              #15
                              Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

                              Sotheby's is auctioning off Vostok I next month.

                              Ursus minor and I are going to try to see it before it goes.

                              They actually sent me an email announcement of this auction. I think that they have an ill-founded idea of the extent of my disposable income.

                              To follow up on CV's amazing excerpt, there is also a story that one of the chief engineers on the early Soyuz missions was concerned about technical faults and afraid that the spacecraft wasn't safe. When he reported these concerns to the head of the Soviet Space Program, he was informed that he had just been promoted to cosmonaut, and assigned to that mission.

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                                #16
                                Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

                                It is way more exciting than college savings.

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                                  #17
                                  Best Designed Russian Space Mission Insignia

                                  Somewhat related to this, I just finished reading Mary Roach's Packing For Mars. Very entertaining. Among the humor was a very jarring moment, one that really made me remember the risks involved: she was interviewing a former Space Shuttle flight surgeon who had worked on the Columbia disaster investigation and was talking to him about just what happened to the bodies of the astronauts...then she realized that he was the husband of one of the astronauts who was killed.

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                                    #18
                                    Thanks to ursus arctos, a bump for Yuri.

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                                      #19
                                      Still a massive deal and rightly so

                                      https://twitter.com/astrosamantha/status/1381709375082008578

                                      https://twitter.com/astrosamantha/status/1381710646274842626
                                      Last edited by ursus arctos; 12-04-2021, 21:08.

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                                        #20
                                        Excellent!

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                                          #21
                                          с днем космонавта!

                                          My droog sent me this, which is a bit weird.

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                                            #22
                                            Bit is doing a lot of work in that sentence

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