higginbotham

Scheduled for launch on October 2, 2003, the shuttle Endeavour was to have delivered the S3/S4 truss segment to the International Space Station. No landing date was announced yet, however. The crew would've consisted of 6 astronauts due to the weight of the truss segment: Commander Rick Sturckow, Pilot Mark Polansky, and Mission Specialists Jim Reilly, Pat Forrester, Rick Mastracchio, and Joan Higginbotham. The Columbia disaster later cancelled the flight and some of the crew had to wait until June 2007 when 4 other crew members joined Sturckow, Reilly, and Forrester: Lee Archambault, Steve Swanson, John Olivas, and Clay Anderson. Anderson was to join the then-current expedition aboard the outpost and Sunita Williams was to land with the replacement shuttle for the remanifested STS-117: Atlantis.

STS-116 was a Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS) flown by Space Shuttle Discovery. Liftoff was originally scheduled for 7 December 2006, but that attempt was canceled due to a low cloud ceiling. Discovery successfully lifted off during the second launch attempt on 9 December 2006 at 20:47:35 EST. It was the first night launch of a Space Shuttle orbiter since STS-113, which launched on 23 November 2002.
The mission is also referred to as ISS-12A.1 by the ISS program. The main goals of the mission were delivery and attachment of the International Space Station's P5 truss segment, a major rewiring of the station's power system, and exchange of ISS Expedition 14 personnel. The shuttle landed at 17:32 EST on 22 December 2006 at Kennedy Space Center, a delay of 98 minutes from schedule due to unfavorable weather conditions. This mission was particularly notable to Sweden since it was the first time a Scandinavian astronaut (Christer Fuglesang) has visited space.

Single piece construction, cut edge.

This ASTROLAB patch is one of the original patches designed by German space artist Detlev van Ravenswaay (bottom image left - his internet site: www.vanravenswaay.com/explorer/index.html) which he kindly gave to me. Unfortunately he was not able to tell me who did manufactured it.

"Between 4 July and 22 December 2006, Thomas Reiter took part in the Astrolab Mission - ESA's first long-duration mission to the International Space Station. Following the launch with Space Shuttle Discovery on flight STS-121, Reiter spent 166 days on board ISS as Flight Engineer 2 for ISS Expedition crews 13 and 14. During his stay, as well as his duties as Flight Engineer, he conducted 19 experiments on behalf of a number of European institutions and research centres, focussing on areas such as human physiology and psychology, microbiology, plasma physics and radiation dosimetry as well as technology demonstrations. On 3 August 2006, together with NASA astronaut Jeff Williams, he participated in a 5 hour 54 minute spacewalk to install hardware on the ISS exterior to support future assembly work. After 171 days in space, Reiter returned to Earth with STS-116 [Discovery], landing at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on 22 December 2006." (extracted from www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Human_Spaceflight/Astrolab).