Here's some amazing trivia for you as the world continues to celebrate the 50th anniversary for the first moon landing...
On 20 July 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon. The patches on their space suits were made by AAPN member Lion Brothers. Based in Owings Mills, Maryland, USA, and starting in 1967, the company had become the first to supply the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) with embroidered mission patches, starting with Apollo 1.
At the time, punched tape was used to program embroidery machines. An image six times the size of the design, called the enlargement, was produced. The puncher then recorded the X and Y coordinates on the paper tape by punching holes into it. In the case of the Apollo 11 mission patches, the government contract with Lion Brothers dictated that all cartoons and punched tapes had to be destroyed once production was complete. This means that any such patches produced subsequently are copies.