How NASA branded its Artemis launch
How NASA branded its Artemis launch
Talks with Yeezy fizzled after Kanye West announced his presidential campaign in 2020
Hello, in this issue we’ll look at the branding for Artemis I, the first NASA mission on the path to putting boots back on the moon.
Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe to see the art, design, marketing, and visual trends defining the look of politics today:
It’s one small step for returning astronauts to the moon, one giant leap for gradients.
After nearly three months of delays, NASA’s unmanned Artemis I mission launched last week. Its Orion spacecraft is set to break the record this weekend for the furthest distance traveled by a spacecraft designed to carry astronauts, previously set by Apollo 13. Meanwhile, back on Earth, NASA’s on-air launch commentators were breaking new ground with their wardrobe: uniforms designed by Golf Wang, the streetwear brand by rapper Tyler the Creator.
Between streetwear and the mission’s on-trend gradient, Artemis already looks like no NASA mission before it. The unorthodox Golf Wang collab was the work of Oxcart Assembly, a creative agency that worked previously with the space agency on branding and assets for NASA Television and Launch America, its public-private partnership program.
“Every bit of brand identity and content, it kind of has our fingerprints on it,” said Jeff Jetton, an Oxcart Assembly co-founder.
For the mission, the creative agency wanted to try something new, initially having talks with Kanye West’s Yeezy in 2020, long before the brand was dropped by Adidas over West’s antisemitic remarks.
“We went a few rounds with them on this idea and then he ran for president,” Jetton said. “We were like, no dude, this guy’s not the right person to work with NASA because it’s pretty buttoned-up.”
When they first introduced the idea of Tyler the Creator, “people were like, ‘I don’t know about that,’” Jetton said. But two years in the making, “Golf and that team has been amazing. We worked sort of lockstep, hand-in-hand with them.”
The eventual Golf Wang X Oxcart Assembly collection included black Artemis jackets popular with NASA’s commentators on launch night, a grey jacket Josh Groban wore for a performance of the National Anthem, and custom Converse Chuck 70s in the mission’s “Horizon gradient.” The purple-to-peach gradient was provided by NASA, and Oxcart Assembly leaned into it.
“It’s a pretty big departure from red, white, and blue, or red and white, and it’s cool for the time,” Jetton said.
The clothes are government property and have to be returned. “People are offering $10,000 for those Converse because there’s only like 14 pairs made,” Jetton said. “But you know in our contract, we’ll take it all back and we’ll just be ready to grind it down and make something new.”
The only NASA Artemis items available for sale to the public aren’t from Golf Wang, but Rumpl, an Oregon technical blanket brand. Their $199 poncho and $129 blanket are made from recycled polyester and insulation. Oxcart Assembly worked with the company to design the gear for retail since the Golf Wang items wouldn’t be for sale.
NASA’s future planned Artemis missions include Artemis II, which could come as soon as 2024 and will send astronauts to orbit the moon. Artemis III will be the first manned mission to the surface of the moon since Apollo 17, and it could come as soon as 2025. NASA said humans will be living on the moon within this decade.
“We’re not talking about months to do something, it’s like years, and really over the course of a decade, this will begin to play out,” Jetton said.
Trends like gradients or the style of the on-air commentators’ clothing could become passé before U.S. boots touch moon dust again, but Jetton envisioned the possibility of repurposing the clothing into new garments in new styles for future missions.
“What’s cool now might not be cool then, right?” he said.
The Artemis launch show open/title sequence. Credit: Oxcart Assembly
While Oxcart Assembly has built out an expansive portfolio of work for NASA, not everything they’ve pitched has been brought to life. They bid a Crew Transport Vehicle that would take astronauts to the launchpad made from an Airstream motorhome rebuilt with an electric motor. Their proposal was a finalist, but lost on a $1,145 price difference.
“A lot of our sort of foundational thinking goes back to reusability and sort of up-cycling stuff,” Jetton said.
He said his team feels pressure working on NASA projects to live up to the “enormous feats that the people behind all this are pulling off.”
While the nerds at NASA “don’t really fully get how to project something cool into the zeitgeist,” he said, their mission is inherently cool. “They’re still cowboys on rockets.” (After the story was published, Jetton added, “Science communication is inherently difficult, because you've often got incredibly heady, intellectual folks trying to explain complex concepts to the layperson, and more often than not it doesn't translate.”)
[Previously: NASA has entered its hypebeast era, and there’s gradients]
“It’s just the front-end communications of that stuff, like all these people from the janitor to the rocket scientists,” he said. “They’re all putting in so much work to put boots on the ground on the fucking moon, and so we’re trying to convey that in a really cohesive way that speaks to not only the nerds, but the random kids who buy cool streetwear who don’t normally care about this, which is why we’re trying to bridge those gaps.”
Correction: The jackets worn by NASA’s commentators on launch night were black, not blue. I regret the error.
Update: This story was updated with additional information about Oxcart Assembly’s work with Rumpl.