America's getting a space force and wants Trump supporters to choose its logo

Despite the multitudinous and massive problems facing us all here on Earth – irreversible climate change! The increasingly terrifying global turn to the right! War, famine, pestilence! – the Trump administration has decided that the creation of a US Space Force is of the utmost importance.

Vice President Mike Pence revealed plans for the sixth military service in a Washington speech yesterday. The Space Force is set to be populated by patriots with a passion for saving American airspace from the dastardly deeds of all those alien life forces who definitely exist and would definitely direct their attention on the destruction of Delaware, Dallas, and Dunwoody, by 2020. It will be America’s sixth military branch, joining hot on the heels of the marines, the army, the coast guard, the air force, and the navy.

Pence’s team of UFO-fearing designers have also unveiled a series of logo options for the Space Force, which Trump supporters can vote on. According to reports in the Guardian, emails have been sent out by Trump’s re-election campaign manager Brad Pascale, asking fans of the bewigged president to select the best of a six-pack of designs.

Ranging from “could be the label on a really unmemorable but still pricey IPA” to “rejected thumbnail for a bad Netflix Original series” the suggested logos are, if we’re being charitable, charmingly naff.

Brad Pascale told his legions of email-hungry subscribers, “President Trump wants a space force – a groundbreaking endeavour for the future of America and the final frontier,” while graphic designer David Rudnick says, “I’m happy to be killed by an orbital kinetic weapon bearing any of these logos.”

We asked designer and RCA student Liam Johnstone to give us thoughts on the efforts our American cousins have come up with thus far. “At the moment it looks like a homage to the Space Shuttle Missions of the 1980s, re-jigged for the app generation. The goal, it seems, as with many of Trump’s campaign efforts, is to insight nostalgia for a time when space was a new frontier to be explored – think 60s, Kennedy, the moon landing, the Cold War, when America was great…again,” he says.

Liam goes on to say that if he’d been tasked with creating the logos, he’d go for something a tad more functional, “going against the t-shirt graphic bait we’ve seen so far. If the US is honestly concerned with attacks from “growing security threats emerging in space” then I’d hope they’d exercise a little more subtlety, but when has that ever been what the Trump administration has been about? A more modest design might even mean that this next US venture may be taken a little more seriously.”

He adds, "I’d leave the Verhoeven-esque taglines at home. “Mars Awaits” could literally be a slogan for one of Rekall Incorporated’s memory packages, and only at the intersection of reality and 1990s sci-fi does true terror really exist."

Liam, meet Mike, Mike meet Liam.