Space Force logo

President Trump unveiled the new U.S. Space Force logo on Friday, and the Internet didn’t take kindly to it.

The design for the newly minted sixth branch of the military looked an awful lot like the Starfleet Command insignia from the Star Trek series and movies, depicting a delta and a globe encircled by a rocket and set against a backdrop of stars. Minutes after Trump tweeted out the image, a chorus of observers rushed in to ridicule the similarities.

It was an “obvious Star Trek knockoff,” one user wrote. “Boldly going where we’ve gone before,” quipped another. Even actor George Takei, who played Hikaru Sulu in the original series, joked that the franchise was “expecting some royalties from this.”

But the new logo is really just a riff on the original U.S. Air Force Space Command emblem, which dates back decades. And among the people to point that out was Michael Okuda, a longtime Star Trek graphic designer who in the 1990s created the Starfleet Command logo for Paramount, which itself was derived from older designs.

“The arrowhead in the U.S. Space Force logo appears to be borrowed from the U.S. Air Force Space Command emblem, which has been in use since the 1980s,” Okuda, who has also designed emblems for NASA, wrote on Facebook.

“Arrowheads and swooshes and orbits and stars and planets have been used in space emblems long before either of these emblems,” he wrote. “For whatever it’s worth — and I do not own the intellectual property rights in most of my Star Trek work — I’m not offended by the similarities, nor would I accuse the Space Force of plagiarism. I’m just amused. It ain’t that serious.”