Did You Know? The Story of NASA's Two Logos.

Most organisations spend a fortune trying to land on one logo. NASA has spent more than 60 years arguing about two.

They're known, affectionately, as the Meatball and the Worm. And the rivalry between them is one of the great soap operas of graphic design.

The older of the two is the round blue insignia officially adopted in 1959, just a year after NASA was founded. It was designed by James Modarelli, and it's packed with meaning. The blue sphere is a planet. The scattered white dots are stars. The red v-shape, sometimes called the vector, represents aeronautics. And the white orbiting line is a spacecraft circling the whole thing.

It's busy, it's detailed and it's gloriously of its era. It flew on Neil Armstrong's spacesuit when he became the first person to walk on the Moon. And here's a fun detail: nobody called it the Meatball until much later. For years it was simply "the insignia". The nickname only arrived once it had a rival to be compared against.

That rival came in 1975. It started with politics, of all things. In the early 1970s the US government launched the Federal Design Improvement Program, a sweeping effort to drag the design of federal agencies into the modern age. NASA, as the most futuristic agency of all, was chosen as the flagship project.

The New York firm Danne & Blackburn got the job, and designers Richard Danne and Bruce Blackburn delivered something radically different. Four clean red letters, stripped of all decoration, with the crossbars removed from the two A's so they resemble rocket nose cones. Sleek, modern, unmistakable. It was quickly nicknamed the Worm for its smooth, continuous curves.

The real genius wasn't just the logotype though. It was the NASA Graphics Standards Manual that came with it, a meticulous rulebook covering how the identity should be applied to everything from uniforms and vehicles to spacecraft. It's now regarded as one of the finest examples of design systems thinking ever produced, and it's been reissued as a book that's sold tens of thousands of copies to design nerds the world over.

Here's where it turns into a genuine drama. The Worm officially replaced the Meatball from 1976, and it won some of the industry's top honours, including a Presidential Design Award. But plenty of people inside NASA never warmed to it. Part of the problem was how it had been rolled out, with old-guard staff feeling the change had been imposed on them.

In 1992, NASA administrator Dan Goldin pulled the plug. He retired the Worm and brought back the Meatball, partly to restore morale and reconnect the agency with the glory days of Apollo after the trauma of the Challenger disaster. Teams were sent out to strip the Worm off buildings, documents and vehicles. For a piece of design this celebrated, it was a remarkably ruthless exit.

But great design is hard to keep down. The Worm developed a devoted following, turned up everywhere from streetwear to fine art, and in 2020 it made a triumphant return to space on the side of a SpaceX rocket. Today it lives on as a supporting graphic for high-profile missions like Artemis, while the Meatball remains NASA's official insignia.

And recently the two finally made peace. NASA worked with Richard Danne himself, the Worm's original co-designer, to update the graphics standards so that both marques can coexist rather than compete. As one member of NASA's design team put it, the two logos can now live happily together in the same universe. The Meatball is still the official badge. The Worm is the supporting act.

The Meatball versus Worm saga is one of our favourite Did You Know? stories because it's about something every designer eventually runs into: design is never just about what looks best. It's about people, history, emotion and identity.

On paper, the Worm wins. It's cleaner, more modern and more functional, backed by one of the greatest brand manuals ever made. But the Meatball carries the emotional weight of the Moon landings, and you can't redesign your way around how people feel. That's the real lesson. A logo isn't only a mark on a page. It's a container for everything a community believes about itself.

This is part of our Did You Know? series, where we explore the stories behind the world's most iconic design. Follow along on Instagram for more.