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.
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.
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