Michael Okuda, a long time scenic art director for many Star Trek series over the years, writer and creator of several popular Star Trek technical manuals and one of the main organizers for this year’s huge Trek auction which garnered millions of dollars in bids has moved up the real science food chain and has been working on a speical project for NASA, America’s official government run space organization.
Okuda has taken on the responsibility for designing the new NASA logo for the space agency’s next generation lunar lander. The design was unveiled yesterday to a large press gathering at the NASA’s Johnson Space Center, located in Houston, Texas.
This isn’t the first time Okuda has been called on to serve his country in this fashion. In the past few years he has designed a number of insignias for the agency, including those for the upcoming Orion spacecraft and for Project Constellation, projects dealing with sending human crews to both the moon and later to the planet Mars.
The new lungar craft, christened “Altair,” will have the capability of housing four astronauts on their journey to and from Earth’s moon. The ultimate mission will be to establish a permanent Lunar Base by the year 2020.
“Altair is the brightest star in the constellation Aquila and is the twelfth brightest star in the night sky,” said NASA’s Altair project manager, Lauri Hansen. “The word ‘Altair’ finds its origins in Arabic and is derived from a phrase that means ‘the flying one.'”
Okuda has designed a number of insignias for NASA, including that for the Orion spacecraft and for Project Constellation, which encompasses the entire effort to return to Moon and then land men and women on Mars
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