
Often fashion trends start with the expensive brands that are then copied by the mass-market (i.e.

If you are ready to pay $326 for a designer t-shirt, $518 for a crewneck, and nearly $1,900 for a parka, you too can wear the NASA logo. And much more recently clothing designer Heron Preston came out with a line of NASA worm logo clothing. In 2016, the designer Vivienne Tam adopted the NASA worm logo into a clothing line. Last year the clothing accessories company Coach began making NASA-logo apparel like wallets and totes. But NASA was there, easily and affordably accessible. Notably there were no t-shirts with the logos for NOAA or EPA or the US Air Force. In the men’s department, alongside tee-shirts for Darth Vader and Pink Floyd and Animal House, you could find a weather-beaten NASA logo t-shirt. NASA logos started showing up on t-shirts for sale at Target a few years ago. And the American Girl doll company released a spacesuited astronaut doll with the NASA meatball stitched on the chest. Even expensive NASA-branded clothing lines. There are NASA purses and wallets and baseball caps. I spotted a NASA-branded backpack in a novelties store. The NASA logo has appeared on other apparel as well. So why do members of the public want to buy it, especially at a time when NASA is less visible than when it was regularly launching space shuttles?īut it’s not just t-shirts. For the average American, it would be easy to assume that NASA did indeed go out of business several years ago and the “space program,” to the extent that it exists, involves SpaceX shooting cars into space.īut all these merchandizers would not be making NASA-themed apparel if they did not think there was a market for it.
NASA T SHIRT DRIVER
Complicating things even further, this period of decreased public NASA activity has coincided with the ascendancy of SpaceX, particularly the launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket earlier this year, featuring the brilliant publicity stunt of placing a Tesla with a spacesuited driver on top of the rocket. Back in 2012, it was common for people to believe that NASA was “going out of business” with the retirement of the space shuttle. Although the International Space Station has been occupied all this time, you would be hard-pressed to find a member of the American public that knows it is even up there. The last truly major NASA news events were the Pluto flyby in 2015 and the nail-biting Curiosity landing in 2012, both of which received worldwide publicity. NASA has not launched a human spacecraft from American soil in seven years. NASA t-shirts for sale at an Urban Outfitters store. You don’t expect to see children wearing them in Moscow at the World Cup. You expect to see people with NASA t-shirts at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s Complex, or in Houston. A day later I was in Olympic National Park and saw another person wearing a similar t-shirt, and a few days after that, I was in San Diego and saw at least one more person wearing a t-shirt with the NASA meatball logo, and another one with the NASA “worm” logo.Ĭhicago, Seattle, the Olympic Peninsula, and San Diego do not host NASA facilities. More recently I was in Seattle and noticed somebody wearing a NASA t-shirt.

During the World Cup soccer matches in Moscow, while two of the teams were playing (the United States was not competing), one scored a goal and the camera happened to show a cheering child in the stands wearing a t-shirt with the NASA logo. Researchers will soon begin to learn more about the galaxies’ masses, ages, histories, and compositions, as Webb seeks the earliest galaxies in the universe.A few months ago, I was in Chicago and noticed somebody on the street wearing a t-shirt with the NASA “meatball” logo on it. Webb’s NIRCam has brought those distant galaxies into sharp focus – they have tiny, faint structures that have never been seen before, including star clusters and diffuse features. “The combined mass of this galaxy cluster acts as a gravitational lens, magnifying much more distant galaxies behind it. NASA said the cluster in the photo actually serves as a lens of sorts, allowing galaxies behind it to be magnified. The first image was made up of images taken by the Webb telescope over the course of two weeks, in multiple infrared wavelengths, and composited together. The size of the amount of space Webb shot in the photo is the equivalent of “a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.” (Literally, capturing it took less than a day!) This is Webb’s first image released as we begin to #UnfoldTheUniverse: /Y7ebmQwT7j- NASA Webb Telescope July 11, 2022


👀 Sneak a peek at the deepest & sharpest infrared image of the early universe ever taken - all in a day’s work for the Webb telescope.
