The story behind our NASA collection.

The NASA logo/branding is something almost everyone in the world is familiar with, it’s a symbol of human exploration and other worldly adventures that only a very select few ever get to experience.

When you combine that with the fact that you specialise in making one piece snow suits that essentially look like space suits, then the idea to make a NASA inspired ski suit felt like a pretty good one. But how do you make that happen, you can’t just go around using other people’s logos on your own products can you?

You do see retailers and brands using the NASA logos on their own products like hoodies and t-shirts though, so we figured that there must be a way to make it happen, and there was.

We reached out to NASA and got a response with details about the do’s and don’t when using NASA’s branding on your own products. So after a bit of back and forth we had approval on a selection of one piece snowsuits designed with the famous NASA branding on them.

Of course it only felt right to make our very first release an all white suit with red stripes, maybe the most famous space suit design in most people’s minds.

We don’t want to give away all of the trade secrets, but an example of rules you have to follow to get approval on any designs is the use of their two most recognisable logos; the ‘Meatball’ and the ‘Worm’, almost every single person would instantly know exactly what these were if they saw them. But they are from different eras or NASA, the Meatball logo dates all the way back to 1959 only a year after NASA itself was born. Whereas the Worm logo didn’t arrive on the scene until 1975 when it replaced the Meatball logo. However, NASA actually reverted back to using the Meatball in 1992, until it was again replaced by the Worm logo eight years later in 2020. The point here is NASA won’t let you use both logos on the same product, as they represent different periods in NASA’s history.

The same rule applies to using any of the different logos from various NASA missions. For example if you use the Meatball logo, then you couldn’t also use a mission patch from between 1975-1992 when the Worm logo was in use.

All of our NASA designs have used the more modern Worm logo on the chest, with the logo from mission STS-53 in 1992 on the arm. You can see it on our latest NASA suit here.

STS-53 was a NASA Space Shuttle Discovery mission in support of the United States Department of Defense. The mission was launched on December 2, 1992, from Kennedy Space Center, Florida. 

We didn’t just use this mission patch just because it looked cool and was allowed by NASA, although that would have been a good enough reason. There were five crew members on this mission, one of which was Michael R. Clifford. Michael sadly passed away in December 2021, a few months after we released our first ever NASA snow suit. But he did complete three missions during his career as a NASA astronaut before he retired in 1997, including STS-53, that’s pretty cool.

Long story short, Michael shared the same surname as the Oneskee founder’s Scott and Josh Clifford. And although no relation, this felt like a nice reason to choose this specific mission patch when designing our very own NASA suit. You’re not actually allowed to use the names of the crew members on the patch, this is their property and is why they are missing from the patch we use on our suits.

We know Michael went to space, but we don’t know whether he was a skier or snowboarder - either way we hope he would have liked the hidden meaning behind using the patch for mission STS-53 on our suits.

You can browse our NASA collection here.