Wait, the NASA Logo on SpaceX's Rocket Looks Completely Messed Up

Wait, that doesn't look right at all.

Rush Job

A Falcon 9 rocket effortlessly delivered a Crew Dragon spacecraft with a crew of four on board into orbit this week. But before it disappeared in the blue yonder, there was something off about the rocket's looks.

Onlookers jumped to point out that NASA's iconic logo, a star-studded blue circle with a red swoop known as the "meatball" looked... wrong.

"Wait… what… what happened to Crew-5’s meatball?" Florida Today space reporter Emre Kelly tweeted.

Sure enough, the text in the rocket's painted-on logo was noticeably off-center. Of course, a badly painted logo isn't exactly going to put the lives of astronauts in danger — but it's a simple job that you'd expect the crackshots at SpaceX and NASA to get right.

Besides, fit and finish issues are kind of a well-known thing for SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's various ventures.

Logo Discourse

Here's the logo painted on the rocket (left), with NASA's properly rendered logo on the right. The text was clearly pushed to the right, along with the star constellations.

Netizens had some fun with the botched NASA logo on Twitter.

"Wake up, honey, new NASA logo discourse just dropped," an account named Worm Evangelist — a reference to NASA's other, recently revived logo that was created for Ronald Reagan in 1984 — tweeted.

Spaceflight photographer Nick B shared his own, hilariously hand painted take on NASA's meatball logo.

A different user asked an AI-powered image generator to come up with its own take on the iconic logo, with interesting results.

We'll forgive NASA and SpaceX for the less-than-stellar rendition of one of the most recognizable logos in space exploration today.

If it wasn't for the fact that the Falcon 9 rocket has completed 180 missions successfully over the last 12 or so years, though, we'd be a lot more worried.

But come on, folks. Let's hope they get it right for the lunar variant of SpaceX's much larger Starship and Super Heavy booster.

More on the launch: SpaceX Launches Russian Cosmonaut to ISS Despite Nuclear Threats