NASA employees often design "mission patches" to symbolize their projects and programs. Shuttle-Mir's mission patch description reads: "The rising Sun signifies the dawn of a new era of human spaceflight, the first phase of the U. S./Russian space partnership, Shuttle-Mir. Mir is shown in its proposed final on orbit configuration. The Shuttle is shown in a generic docking tunnel/Spacehab configuration. The Shuttle-Mir combination, docked to acknowledge the union of the two space programs, orbits over an Earth devoid of any definable features or political borders to emphasize the Earth as the home planet for all of humanity. The individual stars near the Shuttle and the Mir station represent the previous individual accomplishments of the U. S. and Russian space programs. The binary star is a tribute to the previous U. S./Russian joint human spaceflight program, the Apollo Soyuz Test Project. The flags of the two nations are symbolized by flowing ribbons of the national colors interwoven in space to represent the two nations' joint exploration of space. NASA SHUTTLE and
are shown in the stylized logo fonts of the two agencies that are conducting this program."
