Logowatch NASA is celebrating 65 years of its iconic "meatball" logo, despite spending the best part of 17 years trying to kill the poor thing.

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, 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. 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 NASA Watch devoting pages to sightings of the worm as the agency attempted to purge itself of the logo.

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 return in 2020 and turned up on the Falcon 9 used to launch crew to the International Space Station (ISS). It was also slapped on the side of the Crew Module Adaptor (CMA) for the Orion spacecraft on the hugely delayed Artemis I mission.

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. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/16/65_years_of_nasas_meatball/