Skylab 4 certificate from NASA MFA Office

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I work for a large organisation that regularly hands out awards of various kinds to recognise excellence or to celebrate particular milestones. I therefore feel some kind of camaraderie with the recipient of this award, although I never knew them personally.

These certificates were printed for employees of NASA and its contractors to commemorate the success of Skylab 4 — the third and final mission to take a crew to the space station.

Printed on US letter-size paper, it displays the insignia of the Skylab program, plus mission insignias for all three Skylab crews (with Skylab 4’s the largest). The employee’s name is printed below (blurred out here for their privacy), together with a short message of appreciation, and facsimiles of the signatures of the three astronauts who flew the mission: Jerry Carr, Ed Gibson, and Bill Pogue.

This is an ordinary piece of paper made extraordinary by its association with an extraordinary achievement. Skylab 4 put a crew of three astronauts on a space station for 84 days of scientific research and returned them safely to Earth.

I sometimes wonder whether any of the ephemera from our office will one day be collectable to someone!

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Copyright information: this certificate was issued by NASA’s Manned Spaceflight Awareness Office. As a work of the US federal government, it is in the public domain.