65 years of NASA's meatball: Original logo lives on despite detractors
- Reference: 1721150952
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/07/16/65_years_of_nasas_meatball/
- Source link:
[1]
Painters work on the official NASA insignia, nicknamed "the meatball," on the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 29, 2020 – Credit: NASA/Kim Shiflett
The official logo of the US Space Agency, the iconic blue circle with stars, the word "NASA" with an orbiting spacecraft, and a red chevron representing aeronautics, first arrived in 1959, shortly after the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) became the agency that would go on to land Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin onto the lunar surface ten years later.
The NASA seal is slightly different – in its history, [2]the agency noted : "If the meatball is the everyday face of NASA, the NASA seal is the dressed-up version" – but it is the meatball which is most associated with the agency. [3]According to NASA , "After a NASA Lewis (now Glenn) Research Center illustrator's design was chosen for the new agency's official seal, the head of Lewis' Research Reports Division, James Modarelli, was asked by the executive secretary of NACA to design a logo that could be used for less formal purposes."
However, it could have been very different. A concerted effort was made to kill off the iconic meatball in 1975, as the agency switched to "the worm" – a logo with just the letters NASA rendered in red, with the horizontal bars of the "A"s removed. This was to mark the end of the of Apollo days, but it was not universally popular within the agency.
In 1992, the meatball returned as then NASA administrator Dan Goldin sought to remove the worm. One result was sites such as [4]NASA Watch devoting pages to sightings of the worm as the agency attempted to purge itself of the logo.
[5]
Memorably, the Space Shuttle fleet was adorned with the worm logo before the meatball replaced it, and the Hubble Space Telescope still carries it. The worm made a surprise [6]return in 2020 and turned up on the Falcon 9 used to launch crew to the International Space Station (ISS). It was also [7]slapped on the side of the Crew Module Adaptor (CMA) for the Orion spacecraft on the hugely delayed Artemis I mission.
[8]SpaceX hit by inflight Falcon 9 failure
[9]Trouble in space as Boeing's not going, and China's back from the Moon
[10]NASA tests the ups and downs of air taxi comfort with VR
[11]NASA ought to pay up after space debris punched a hole in my roof, homeowner says
NASA's logo has caused much internal agency handwringing over the years. The meatball is iconic but tough to reproduce. The worm is instantly recognizable and a single color but isn't associated with what many feel are the agency's glory days.
In truth, there is a place for both logos, and both are now found within the agency's walls and on its spacecraft. The meatball turned 65 years old yesterday. Next year, the worm turns 50. Happy birthday. ®
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[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2024/07/16/nasa.jpg
[2] https://www.nasa.gov/history/symbols-of-nasa/
[3] https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/the-meatball-turns-65/
[4] https://nasawatch.com/culture/worm-watch/
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZpbteFNVRXf51hpry1jxCwAAAY8&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/03/nasa_worm_logo_spacex_iss/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/14/orion_nasa_worm_logo/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/12/spacex_suffers_an_inflight_falcon/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/02/kettle_iss_boeing/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/28/nasa_tests_rider_comfort_in/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/24/nasa_ought_to_pay_up/
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Meatball forever
I have a certain nostalgia for the "worm," since it's the NASA logo of my childhood.
Re: worm from childhood
I would need to admit the same here but my own memories are not the point for me. The meatball is individual and absolutely unique, the worm is simply a typeface choice and a common one from the 1970's at that.
As a design choice the meatball is 'timeless' because it can, only, be identified with NASA. The worm's typeface choice can be seen in many other products and services from the period. As graphic layout is part of my job there is only one obvious choice: a logo that can *never* be mistaken or a typeface that others have also used.
tl;dr - Toto's "Africa" is now older than Glenn Miller's "Chattanooga Choo Choo" was in 1982
I was a child of the 80s, and I resented it when they switched from what was still a good, very modern-looking logo (back) to something that looked old-fashioned in a way that it almost had a musty-old-book smell about it.
In hindsight I can understand that the older logo had the more positive associations of NASA's late 50s to early 70s heyday and they most likely wanted to return to it for that reason. But I'm still not a big fan personally- it's absolutely stuck in that post-War/50s era.
What's odd is that there were only, apparently, seventeen years between the 1959 "meatball" and the 1976 "worm", yet they feel like the products of very different eras . (And I suspect the former already looked that way in 1976).
Whereas, despite the fact that the "worm" logo is now much, *much* older than the meatball was back then, it still looks "modern" today despite being just a couple of years short of its fiftieth anniversary . (Something it has in common with many "modern" logos the late 60s to early 80s era, e.g. [1]Saul Bass' classic early-1970s Warner Communications logo ).
(Warning; this is where I get distracted by the more general idea of how bizarre it is that now-forty-to-fifty-year-old-stuff still seems "modern" and relevant. Feel free to read on or, er... not.)
What's noticeable is how how many things from (e.g.) the 1980s still hold their appeal and influence the culture today. For example- an in particular- kids listening to 1980s music.
I always had a soft spot for Toto's "Africa"- one of the first songs I enjoyed after I started getting more into music and following the charts as a kid. Like many 80s hits- still considered a "banger" (cough) today by kids born decades after it came out, yet it's forty-two years old .
Yeah, that's surprisingly old in absolute terms, but- for those of us who grew up at that time- what really puts it into bizarre perspective is to consider what music of a similar age would have been back then. You'd have been talking about WW2-era musicians like Vera "We'll Meet Again" Lynn or Glenn Miller and similar "big band" material.
No disrespect to any of those artists, but you can't even *begin* to imagine how utterly ancient any of that stuff would have seemed to a Top-of-the-Pops watching kid in 1982, or how bizarre and unlikely it would have been for most of us to be interested in it.
That wasn't even my (boomer) parents' generations' music or era; it was near enough two generations back. Even twenty-year-old black-and-white footage of the early Beatles looked somewhat old to me back then.
Early 1940s music and culture in general would have seemed so distant by 1982 that I don't think anyone of my age would have been able to relate to it *or* its style, yet the 80s music and culture we're still listening to and treating as relevant today is now just as old.
And that's... weird.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Warner_Communications.svg
Re: Meatball forever
Said it before, I'll say it again: Sperm vs Worm.
#TeamWorm, but they both look good.
Let's at least agree we all deserve a -->
A blue meatball?
That means it is moving towards us very rapidly, right?
Re: A blue meatball?
... or that cooking is far from optimal. Rare meat is not what NASA is supposed to produce - although carbonized ones did happened sometimes, I was told.
Meatball forever
The meatball is both iconic and unique; the worm is simply formed from a common typeface style used in the 1970's, nothing unique about it at all.