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.
Jacques lives in Houten, the Netherlands, and is working as a printer. He is a free-lance correspondent for 'Spaceflight', the magazine of the British Interplanetary Society.
Erik lives in Sneek, the Netherlands and works as editor/page designer with a daily newspaper appearing in the northern part of the country. He dedicates his spacepatch related work to his late uncle, who was 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. Luc has been publishing in Spaceflight magazine and regularly contributes commentary on topical spaceflight themes to BNR Newsradio. A number of his earlier designs made it into space through his work in Spaceview with Jaap Terweij.
Jaap (1946), better known as 'Japio', met Yuri Gagarin in 1962 at a youth congress in Finland and is hooked to Soviet/Russian spaceflight ever since. In 1983, he co-authored an early book about the Salyut project. He is considered one of the founding fathers of the Soyuz patch project, together with an undisclosed fifth member of the group, a Russian spaceflight official/patch collector.
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.
Erik, Jacques, Luc and Japio at one of their infamous 'embroidery club meetings'.