‘The Meatball’ vs. ‘The Worm’: How NASA Brands Space
The space agency’s current symbol, a beloved signal of the agency’s storied past, wasn’t always so beloved.
“It’s a design nightmare,” Greg Patt, a publishing contractor for NASA, sighed. He was talking about the logo that’s been the space agency’s official one since 1992: the blue sphere meant to suggest both Earth and other planets, its interior sprinkled with stars of white and and belted with the letters N-A-S-A, all of it connected by a swoopingly aeronautical chevron of red.
That logo, has come to be—the optical approach nicknamed the “
