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| The Crew & Mission |
(S76-29562 - 17 September, 1976) -- The two crews for the Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests (ALT) are photographed at the Rockwell International Space Division's Orbiter assembly facility at Palmdale, California on the day of the rollout of the Shuttle Orbiter 101 "Enterprise" spacecraft. They are, left to right, Astronauts C. Gordon Fullerton, pilot of the first crew; Fred W. Haise Jr., commander of the first crew; Joe H. Engle, commander of the second crew; and Richard H. Truly, pilot of the second crew. The DC-9 size airplane-like Orbiter 101 is in the background.
| ALT Artwork |
(S76-30340 - 04 November, 1976) -- This circular, red, white, and blue emblem has been chosen as the official insignia for the Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Test (ALT) flights. A picture of the Orbiter 101 "Enterprise" is superimposed over a red triangle, which in turn is superimposed over a large inner circle of dark blue. The surnames of the members of the two ALT crews are in white in the field of blue.
This crew patch for the Approach and Landing Test was first displayed April 05 at a crew press conference. Fred Haise, commander of the first crew, commented: "The pach is sort of an indication when you're ready to fly. When you finally figured out and argued out what the spacecraft names were in Apollo and you had your patch, you knew you were about there. Actually our name came easy in this program so we only had to fuss about what our patch looked like."
| Collecting Enterprise & ALT |
(Left: This patch originates from the personal collection of Gerry Schwartz, who worked at Rockwell International's Downey plant during the late seventies. Schwartz was employed at the Avionics Development Laboratory and was leading the team who designed and tested the Backup Flight System for the orbiter.)
| Souvenir and remakes |
Thanks to Harald Kraenzel and Don Willis for some of the images used on this page.