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NASA has a meatball and a worm. The meatball—a sphere of stars, a red chevron, and a comet orbiting the agency’s acronym—came first, in 1959, and was attached to spacesuits and capsules. It was followed, in 1975, by the worm, just red letters, a sleek, curvilinear, futuristic logo. One says Lewis and Clark in space; the other says cool space station. The worm was praised—loved, even—until 1992, when a NASA administrator suddenly revived the meatball, thereby ditching the worm. Nevertheless, the worm persisted, living quietly in space on the sides of satellites and, on Earth, in the hearts of pro-worm people, especially in the design world. “I think a lot of people tried to kill it,” Hamish Smyth, a graphic designer, said during a recent visit to NASA’s headquarters, in Washington, D.C. “I mean, it’s carved into the building here, and they actually tried to remove it.”
Smyth was at NASA to celebrate the worm’s official return, and, as more graphic artists filed into the James E. Webb Auditorium, he and Michael Bierut, a partner at Pentagram, the New York-based design firm, reminisced about their first worm sightings. Bierut’s occurred when he was in design school in Cincinnati, in the late seventies. “I looked at that ‘A’ and thought, Oh, that’s the nose cone of a rocket,” he said.
Smyth was growing up in Australia when, in 1991, his aunt and uncle brought worm-era freeze-dried ice cream home from Houston. “When we think of NASA, my generation thinks of the Space Shuttle and the worm,” he said.
In the auditorium, the worm celebration was kicked off with remarks by David Rager, the space agency’s creative director, summarizing the worm-meatball détente. The worm officially resurfaced on NASA’s Demo-2 mission, a collaboration with SpaceX; if you watched the 2020 launch, you saw a giant worm on the two-hundred-and-thirty-foot-long booster rocket and tiny worms on the astronauts’ spacesuits. (The white Tesla that drove them to the launchpad had a big meatball on its door.) The new compromise: meatballs on crew capsules, worms on booster rockets. “Aesthetically, some might say they come from different planets,” Rager said, “but we found that with just the right balance they complement each other.”
A panel discussion featured Richard Danne, whose tiny firm, Danne & Blackburn, was new when it created the worm. His partner, the late Bruce Blackburn, had just finished working on the logo for the Bicentennial. “It’s 1974,” said Shelly Tan, the Washington Post graphics reporter who moderated, setting the scene. “President Nixon and the N.E.A., the National Endowment for the Arts, have kick-started a federal program to basically revamp the design identities of forty-plus federal agencies.” Danne recounted his strategy, which, to a room of designers, felt test-pilot bold.
“We decided to propose one symbol, only one,” Danne said.
It is now graphic-design lore that, before accepting the worm, NASA executives inspected the logo’s “A”s and inquired about the letter’s missing horizontal bar. “I just don’t think we’re getting our money’s worth,” one NASA higher-up said. Danne and Blackburn subsequently created a graphic-standards manual that is a cult classic for designers today. Walter Cronkite was an early fan. “He loved it,” Danne said.
The panel featured remarks on the worm’s travels through pop culture—a milestone occurred around 2017, when Coach made worm inquiries and NASA responded positively, surprising even Bert Ulrich, the agency’s branding liaison. “All of a sudden, everything sort of opened up,” he said. Like a satellite picking up speed in orbit, the worm zoomed into hyperspace. Ariana Grande wore it to brunch. Even BTS got worm-interested.
NASA employees and visitors assembled outside, to dedicate a sixteen-foot-long rendering of the worm in front of NASA HQ and to present Danne, who is eighty-nine, with its Exceptional Public Achievement Medal. The giant worm marks the entrance to the new Earth Information Center, which Rager’s team helped design. The center is what designers nowadays call “immersive,” and tells the story of our planet. A number of young NASA designers from the Goddard Space Flight Center, in Maryland, crowded around the worm and chatted with Danne. When it was all over, he took a breather in the NASA library, amazed at his own trajectory, from a Dust Bowl Oklahoma farm to this splendid comeback, his design again heading for space. “When I first came here, in 1974,” he said, “I thought this was heaven.” ♦
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