NASA pops old-school worm logo onto Orion spacecraft NASA has slapped its worm logo on the side of the Crew Module Adaptor (CMA) for the Orion spacecraft as the first Artemis mission to the Moon inches closer. The logo had already been stuck on the underside of the CMA last year, but sticking it on the side will ensure it is visible once the Orion spacecraft and its European- …
The correct order of logos (as opposed to the seal which has always been been a dressed up meatball):
The Meatball
The Worm
The Meatball
The 60th Anniversary (never flown)
The Worm
IMHO the Meatball looks outdated and few know what the four elements symbolize while the Worm uses a more modern typeface, removes the obscure symbolism, and is more recognizable through a telephoto lens. Compare the Meatball with the ESA:
https://blogs.nasa.gov/artemis/wp-content/uploads/sites/303/2021/02/Orion-ESA-Logo_0012_cropped-1024x846.jpg
For me, I find the meatball logo to just look like another US department-of-OOOO generic logo.
It's also too "Noisy" in my opinion, with the orbit and the chopsticks or whatever those red lines are supposed to be.
The red logo is simple and feels more futuristic to me... Or at least it feels like what the future felt like when I was still a "young man with a promising future"
I prefer the worm logo. Even though it was designed over 40 years ago, it seems more futuristic than the "meatball" they've been using more recently. I know the "meatball" is actually their original logo, but it always reminds me NASA is a military organisation. I know it's function is largely military (and therefore classified), but I've never thought that Logo fit with NASA as a Scientific/Exploration organisation.
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I don't know what all the fuss is about, least of all strange nicknames for logo designs like "meatball" or "worm". An organisation who is constantly reinventing its "branding" has too much time and money on its hand or has lost sight of the its primary mission. Especially when said organisation is notionally a public org.
The Apollo program consumed about 2.5% of the USA GDP for 10 years
Nasa now probably consumes 2.5% of the USA PowerPoint resources to promulgate changes in logo, mission statement, strategic objectives and national goals.
They may still have a copy of Keeble space Program somewhere
>JPL is NASA. What's your point again?
Actually JPL is Caltech, leased to NASA, who contract operations back to Caltech (at least when I worked there) while everyone claiming this is efficient.
NASA may have got its rocket scientists from the Third Reich but it definitely got its administration from the CCCP
> Actually JPL is Caltech, leased to NASA
Well, they seem to disagree. If you go to the JPL website it clearly states "JPL is a federally-funded research and development center managed by Caltech for NASA". Keyword "for NASA", meaning NASA are the owners...
Wikipedia is even more categorical: "JPL is owned by NASA and managed by the nearby California Institute of Technology". Sorry.
NASA is a little more than just the Apollo program! Or even the whole space program, from Mercury to the ISS...
You'd be astonished by the number of NASA technologies you use in your daily life, and let's not mention aeronautics (the whole slew of experimental "X" rocket planes, first to go faster than the speed of sound, were built by NACA, the ancestor of NASA).
NASA, in one way or another, has contributed to a lot of America's star technological achievements and firsts. It might not be as agile as some private companies, never been, but describing it as an obsolete fat cat is ungrateful at best.
You'd be astonished by the number of "Space" inventions that were invented/developed for nuclear weapons, from PTFE to micro-electronics.
Instead astronomers in universities come up with proposals, university labs + JPL + Boeing/Ball/Lockheed build them.
Nasa used to be responsible for launching them.
Now they are built and launched commercially, NASA mostly adds overhead.
What NASA really wants to do is manned missions - t brings decades of funding and glory.
Hence SLS and whatever the "Put Square Jawed (but ethnically diverse) Test Pilots on the Moon Again" mission is called this budget cycle.
> You'd be astonished by the number of "Space" inventions that were invented/developed for nuclear weapons
Including the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo rockets used to go to space. Same thing happened in the Soviet Union, their rockets were initially based on ICBMs. What's your point?
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> Nasa used to be responsible for launching them.
You didn't read my other post above, did you. Launching stuff to space is just a tiny fraction of what NASA does. But obviously if you consider all the active parts of NASA (like JPL) as independent entities, there isn't much left indeed...
Listen, you are apparently utterly convinced that NASA is just a laughable federal straw man stealing the glory of the hard-working state and private actors. While I really don't care to question your political views, please have the intellectual honesty to admit that at least in this case reality might not corroborate your assumptions. NASA isn't a useless parasite, it is the independent agency of the United States government in charge of research about anything that leaves the ground in one way or another: A clue is in the name: "National Aeronautics and Space Administration" (Aeronautics is planes, from your private Cessna to the latest stealth fighter).
I know that in the eternal "private vs. federal" debate it is fashionable to badmouth NASA as being a big-government relic long past its sell-by date, but that only works if you willingly ignore what NASA is and does. Still today.
I was only 4/5 months old when Apollo 11 landed...
I'm guessing that the excitement now about Starship and Mars is how the excitement for Apollo was.
I just hope that I can watch the first Mars landing and Mars-walk...
Just wondering if the pictures from the lander will be as good as the test launches...
Anyone old enough to remember Apollo 11 landing?
I am and I recall that the picture was just a white splodge on a black background. Admittedly, we only had B/W but some of my school friends had colour TV and I asked them what they saw (me expecting colour to show more details). Almost all of them said they hadn't watched it live. I think there was only about 3 or 4 of us in the class that had watched it live.
Very disappointing.
TV picture was grainy, even by standards of the day but intelligible. One could see what was being shown. I remember being told Mars landings were only 20 years away. Should have built the original Orion space ships, it might have happened. 5000 tons in Mars orbit so decent size and supplies for a two year trip.
I think there was only about 3 or 4 of us in the class that had watched it live.
I watched it live -- even though it took place in the evening on my mother's birthday (and as I was only 13 it may have been after my 'official' bed-time) I was allowed to have the TV on. We had a fairly unambitious B&W set, but you could see quite a bit more than just a splodge.
My school also let us watch the moon coverage on a big TV (one of those fancy 625-line jobs that could get BBC2) in one of the school halls for a couple of days after that -- I don't remember what happened to lessons -- and the picture wasn't that much more revealing.
As we were living in UTC-4 back then, the moon landing was at 16:19 local time and there were no bedtime exemptions necessary to watch it live. And for a nine year old with already a fair understanding of all the tech required to get there as well as beam a signal back for us to watch, it was Bloody Impressive. And the image quality was well better than "white splodge on black background"; they were clearly humanoid shapes, moving limbs and hopping around, although of course it was no match for the photos and film brought back.
Watched every second that I was allowed to.
Even touching the TV set required permission when I was a kid.
Thankfully my parents indulged me. It helped that Dad had been a jet fighter pilot.
Watched the lunar excursion from school. The whole school, 100 kids, around a single 26” AWA B&W set. The TV was bought in specially for the event. I remember seeing the men and the van that delivered it.
Needless to say, I was riveted to Apollo, and always have been since.
I do, but what I really remember is 13. I suspect there were orders of magnitude more followers of that mission all over the planet, and it was riveting even if you weren't normally a fan of manned space flight. That's what comes from relatively open and public missions. Well has it been called NASA's finest hour.
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