When I was growing up in a NASA KSC bedroom community during the Apollo program, everybody’s parents including mine worked at “the Cape”, and life was saturated with space. The kids like me grew up with the worm. To us it represented how cool & futuristic NASA is. (Short thread) https://twitter.com/nytscience/status/1247904794997489664

2/ In fact, the word “NASA” became an adjective. Bill Scott down the street had cool stuff in his bedroom —I mainly remember his telescope. One day Tim Davis told me “Scott’s room is NASA.” He meant that it was cool like NASA, but we would just say, “wow, that’s NASA.”

3/ Of course, nothing was as NASA as NASA itself. Things that we called NASA were reflecting what we admired in the actual NASA. The worm helped forge our admiration. It was an image that represented the agency’s success.

4/ When I finished college and was hired by NASA, I saw a different perspective among the employees. They were unhappy with the politics that had caused the space program to retreat from the Moon and become stuck in low Earth orbit.

5/ I remember one time in the late 80s we got new badges, and an Apollo veteran said the design of badges was not as cool as the old ones, and the old ones weren’t as cool as the ones before that. He said “we keep taking steps away from how cool things were in the Apollo days.”

6/ In 1993, in the midst of an effort to get NASA freed from the crippling politics and take missions back to deeper space, the agency revived the meatball. Bob Crippen wrote, “it was widely...associated with the technical and managerial excellence for which the agency is noted”.

7/ Because of these events, the worm became associated in the minds of many insiders — unfairly I will add — with being stuck in low Earth orbit. It came to represent a hollowed-out space program with sleek marketing but no substance. It symbolized *precisely* what they disliked.

8/ So the meatball became it’s opposite. Its design was decidedly NOT sleek but had a strong 60s vibe, a reminder of engineers with narrow ties, pocket protectors full of pens, slide rules, Saturn V‘s, and humans on the Moon.

9/ The problem is, reviving the meatball didn’t free us from crippling politics. We‘ve now lived in this era of stagnation with BOTH symbols. And we are still working hard to bust this paper bag that surrounds Earth so we can return to deep space. We’re almost there!

10/ So now is a good time to recover the worm from its unfair association with being stuck in LEO. The worm never was form without substance, because it was born *in* the success of the Apollo program, and NASA *did* do an amazing amount of cool things through the 70s-90s.

11/11 So I’m super happy to see the worm again. I’m also going to start using “NASA” as an adjective like we did as kids when the worm was the logo. Starting now: The worm is so NASA! The future we are now creating as we get back to deep space is so NASA.