About us


June 6, 1998, 21:54
ICQ ("I-seek-you") conversation


Jacques (in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands): ,,By the way... do you have any idea what else I can put on my website?''.
Erik (in Groningen, the Netherlands): ,,Ehr... no, not really. Maybe your collection of patches?''
Jacques: ,,Yes, I can do that. I could also add my article (about unofficial crew patches, written for the magazine Spaceflight) with some images'',
Erik: ,,Maybe we can put all our patches on the web.''
Jacques: ,,Yes, great idea. Maybe we should make an entire homepage for patches.''
Erik: ,,Yes, with all kinds of background info. A page like that does not exist, if I am correct.''


Jacques Edwin van Oene and Erik van der Hoorn were born 5 days apart in the same hospital room in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, in February 1972. Living only 100 meters from eachother and visiting the same elementary school, they became 'infected' with the 'space virus' by an enthusiastic school teacher in 1981.

Jacques lives in Houten, the Netherlands, and is working as a printer. He is a free-lance correspondent for 'Spaceflight', the magazine of the British Interplanetary Society.

Erik lives in Sneek, the Netherlands and works as editor/page designer with a daily newspaper appearing in the northern part of the country. He dedicates his spacepatch related work to his late uncle, who was also a spaceflight enthusiast, L.C. (Loek) Perlee, Jr.

Luc van den Abeelen (1965) has been collecting and designing space patches since the 80's. Luc has been publishing in Spaceflight magazine and regularly contributes commentary on topical spaceflight themes to BNR Newsradio. A number of his earlier designs made it into space through his work in Spaceview with Jaap Terweij.

Jaap (1946), better known as 'Japio', met Yuri Gagarin in 1962 at a youth congress in Finland and is hooked to Soviet/Russian spaceflight ever since. In 1983, he co-authored an early book about the Salyut project. He is considered one of the founding fathers of the Soyuz patch project, together with an undisclosed fifth member of the group, a patch collecting Russian spaceflight official.

The idea for creating a site emerged in June 1998. At first, Jacques hosted the images and information on his own "Jacqmans" website at Angelfire. In 2000'spacepatches.com' was registered. That name was changed to 'spacepatches.info' in January 2002. In September 2005, the site was moved to spacepatches.nl, the url-extension for The Netherlands.

The original idea to put all existing space patches on the web, has still not been realized. In those sections, a lot of work still has to be done... Work gradually shifted to the design and production of patches. In the mean time, some other good and specialized websites about patches have come online. Maybe, one day, when we are really old and have enough time...


Erik, Jacques, Luc and Japio at one of their infamous 'embroidery club meetings'.