On May 15th, 2020, the flag of the newly created US Space Force was unveiled at the White House: a symbol of “defense and protection from all adversaries”, designed to inspire American leadership in the final frontier and glorify the nation’s military power. But what if it looked different? What if it wasn’t the banner of an army in search of another battlefield, but the symbol of a world ready to ascend, together?
This is the idea behind United Space Force Earth: a full redesign of the visual identity for the US Army’s new branch. If it no longer looks like an act of war, that’s because it has been reimagined as an act of unity: an undivided space force, on a mission to lift off from the boundaries of our world.
“Space is where we can stop dividing as nations, and start expanding as one species”—this is the belief that inspired me to rethink Trump’s Space Force initiative in a radical new way, a few weeks away from Election Day.
With the upcoming vote that might spin our planet one way or another, the speculative design project aims to give a hopeful outlook on the future of geopolitics—and astropolitics.
Whereas the Delta symbol in the original Space Force logo is a direct legacy from America's military culture, the core element of the redesign is based on Pale Blue Dot (a famous photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe, from a record distance of about 3.7 billion miles). It symbolizes the cognitive shift that occurs while looking back at our planet from a distance: a striking feeling of unity—what astronauts call, the Overview Effect.
Around the central blue dot of the redesigned logo, a succession of orbits dynamically builds, reflecting humanity’s expanse into outer space. These orbits are guided along a spiral shape that follows the Fibonacci sequence, a unique pattern that can be found in the very proportions of everything, from nature's smallest building blocks to the most unimaginably large celestial bodies of the universe, like spiral galaxies. (Our Milky Way is a spiral galaxy.)
The visual identity is evolutive. It’s a fractal design system, where each new magnification marks the reach of a new astronomical milestone. The deeper in space we go, the more it continues to expand, while the outer shape remains the blue dot from where we came. With each AU (Astronomical Unit) travelled, the Space Force logotype will continually evolve over time—ever championing our species’ expanse across the universe.
The full United Earth Space Force work can be discovered online on http://spaceforce.design, a digital experience that lets you appreciate in detail (typography, colors, construction, modularity...) all the thinking behind this redesigned visual identity.
The United Earth Space Force has been imagined and created by Guillaume Roukhomovsky, a 31 French-born Amsterdam-Based Creative Director and designer. Amongst other projects, he previously imagined S-PARK (a bike rack system that turns the energy produced by people on their bike, into electricity for their own neighborhood) and launched the GIVE-A-SHEET fundraising during the first Covid-19 wave.
More info: spaceforce.design
