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.
Erik started collecting patches in 1984, when his brother Leo bought him an STS-2 patch at a spaceflight exhibition. Jacques followed in 1988, when he purchased an STS-26 patch at a local planetarium to commemorate the return-to-flight.
Jacques lives in Houten and is working as a printer for Koninklijke Drukkerij C.C. Callenbach in Nijkerk. He is a free-lance correspondent for 'Spaceflight', the magazine of the British Interplanetary Society.
Erik lives in Sneek, the Netherlands and works as an international news and front page editor with the Leeuwarder Courant, a daily newspaper appearing in the northern part of the country. He dedicates his work on spacepatches.info to his late uncle, 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. A number of his designs made it into space through his work in Spaceview with Jaap Terweij. Luc has been publishing in Spaceflight magazine and regularly contributes commentary on topical spaceflight themes to BNR Newsradio.
The idea for creating a site emerged in 1998, and was realized in 2000, when '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 site aims to share Erik's, Jacques' and Luc's collections and knowledge with fellow collectors, to enable research, to preserve the history of space patches and inspire others.
Erik flying the full scale orbiter mock-up at Downey, California in March 1999; Jacques inspecting Space Shuttle Columbia at Palmdale, California in November 2000; Luc at Kennedy Space Center, Florida in January 2006 with the Atlas V that would send New Horizons to Pluto.