The Air Force has come out with a new badge.

Sweet. Very science-fictiony (in a good way).

Remenisent of the Starfleet emblem. I like it!

*Real* missile troops wear this badge, which is earned by actual experience, while the Air Force Badges are earned by completing a school and upgraded by merely staying around long enough.

> *Real* missile troops wear this badge, which is earned by actual experience,

Actually, I think that badge is worn by *u-boat* troops.

To the best of my knowledge, the Navy does not have any troops who ride missiles.

Unless you count Shuttle astronauts -- and they don't wear that badge.

Doesn't the Air Force have anyone left with some creative juices running through their veins? Come on, any idiot with half a brain can tell that new badge is a complete copy of the Star Trek Emblem. Can't they come up with anything orginial any more? Just another symptom of the problems with our aerospace industry. No one important wants thinks outside of the box anymore. Thankfully, there's people like Rutan and Branson to rock the boat a little.

They didn't include the Stargate in the badge. ;-)

...At the risk of an awful pun, it'll never fly. Note this part of the article:

"...The badge still needs to be processed through the Air Force uniform board, Institute of Heraldry and be mass-produced by the manufacturers."

That badge - cool as it is - will run into fatal opposition from pilots and aircrew. It looks far too much like a set of wings, and the senior brass will back up the pilots.

Mike

This badge has been making the rounds at The Pentagon, and I haven't heard any huge outcry yet. I think it has a pretty good shot at "flying". Besides, space operators are now wearing green flightsuits that were once only worn by pilots.

The biggest news to me is that the missile badge "pocket rocket" is going away. I was involved in an earlier badge consolidation effort, and the stubbornness of the people with missile badges (some of them were good friends of mine) was shocking to me. The words "cold dead hands" were used.

As to the "Star Trek" badge thing, this version actually looks less like the Star Trek insignia than the previous badge.

When it first made the rounds of the Pentagon, it was accompanied by a picture of the insignia on the front of Buzz Lightyear's space suit. Look it up. WAY too close for my liking. The space guys I work with are not too crazy about it.

Tom-
Well, that's good news - a bit surprising to me, but good anyways. I went through the badge battles of the mid-80s, and I'm still a bit skeptical of whether or not it'll survive in its present form, but we'll see. Who exactly is going to wear this thing?

Best regards,
Mike

Mike,

My understanding is all space and missile operators will wear the badge. The 3-level skill set folks (apprentices) will wear a badge without the star and wreath. The 5-level skill set folks (craftsmen) will wear a badge with the star. And the 7-level skill set folks (master craftsmen) will wear the badge with both the star and wreath.

Jim's got the basic idea for enlisted personnel. For officers, where skill-level classifications aren't as closely monitored or tested, it has to do with years of experience as to whether you wear the star, wreath, or both.

With the merger of the space and missile badges, any officer going through undergraduate space and missile training (that's what it was called in '99) receives this 'basic' badge (no star), then they'll go on duty as a missileer, satellite operator, launch operations officer, spacetrack, or missile warning operator. Assuming they stay in the career field and do differnt jobs within that group, they eventually get the star and, eventually, the wreath.

The star and wreath look decidedly Soviet to me. Leave off the wing and orbit portion and you have something Stalin would award for exceeding a production quota.

Wasn't Star Trek copying the NASA Meatball design?

Check out the poll results for how the community feels about the badge issue: The Great Badge Debate