Which Logo Came First, United States Space Force or Star Trek’s Starfleet Command?
On Friday 24 January, Donald Trump, unveiled, via Twitter of course, the official badge for the “newly created” United States Space Force, and the internet went crazy about it. Why? The new badge oddly reminded people of the logo for Star Trek’s Starfleet Command.
It is true, the badges are undeniably familiar to each other but in order to claim plagiarism we’ll have to analyze the story of both badges. The first version of the Space Force logo appeared in 1982, when the Government department was called Air Force Space Command and the original badge included, the grey arrow pointing north, the world, 2 hoops and a starry background. So in 2019 the Department changed its name to Space Force and unveiled a new version of its logo keeping the grey around the world, the starry background and only one hoop (probably inspired by NASA’s logo).
Now back to Starfleet Command. Apparently research has found that the first sighting of the Starfleet Command logo was in the year 1996, of course Star Trek and Command Fleet are older than that but the logo apparently isn’t. The Starfleet logo however does include a grey arrow, a starry background and a hoop, so the logo was probably designed to emulate the Government official badges like NASA’s and Air Force Space Command.
Plagiarism? I don’t think so. A bad design decision? Totally. The US government should have noticed the resemblance to the fictional badge. Maybe they did and wanted to play along with it, using a pop culture positioned icon for people to recognize their “brand”. However, making a case for a logo doesn’t actually help to avoid the sci-fi feeling of everything that’s been happening lately, including the creation of a United States Space Force.
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