Apparently the American crew of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project did not wear embroidered mission patches on board the USS New Orleans after the flight. As can be seen in the photo above they wore their flight suits complete with beta cloth patches.

Although they didn't use them on their flight suits, the ASTP crew had a set of special oversize (4¾") patches made with the intials of each crewmember sewn into the border.

These intialled patches, produced in a run of just 150 examples per crewmember by AB Emblem, are regarded by collectors as the crew patch for the ASTP mission.

Since these patches were never available to the general public they are extremely scarce, although examples from what seems to be a production overrun came to market in 2005/6. By my count there were roughly 80 TPS, 70 VDB and 60 DKS patches sold at this time.

Although it was not apparently know at the time it seems that at least some examples of the ASTP crew patch were also made for the Russian crew of Leonov and Kubasov, as a handful of examples came to market amongst the other overruns in 2006. I have only seen one genuine example of a Leonov patch sold and three examples of the Kubasov patch, so these remain exceptionally rare (and sought-after) patches.

The high prices fetched by the over-run patches when they initially came to market led inevitably to people producing sets of 'replicas' (fakes), which were of course sold as if they were the real thing. In the section below you will examples of the two versions seen to-date.