Everything you never knew you wanted to know about the Mercury Project
Mercury patches
From RixWiki
Many museum gift shops and other places which cater to space enthusiasts carry "official" patches for each U.S. Manned space mission. These make nice souvenirs, but they are revisionist history.
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None of the Mercury astronauts wore any of these patches during their flights. The first American astronauts to actually wear mission patches on their pressure suits were Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad on the Gemini 5 mission.
Although some of the patches carry designs based on the insignia carried by the spacecraft, none of these are accurate as to shape and/or color.
The patches themselves seem to have been designed as an afterthought by an enterprising vendor.
But they do make a nice souvenir.
