The Russians were NASA's chief rival during the space race, so it's ironic that it took a young Russian named Max Lapteff to design a smart, speculative rebranding of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration logo.

This circular theme is embodied as an arc that cuts the letters off from the baseline, suggesting the curvature of a planet.

The chunky futuristic font of the "worm" logo, mercifully grounded in 1992, is replaced with a lighter typeface that preserves some of the original hallmarks, like the missing crossbars in the "A's."

The new logo generalizes NASA's mission in a way the current insignia doesn't.

Lapteff designed a style guide that allows the floating orb to be replaced with graphics for specific missions, like a red circle for a mission to Mars or an asteroid for an Armageddon-style adventure.

Where you might find a registration mark on a corporate trademark, Lapteff placed a solid circle.

Paired with the negative space below, it suggests an endless cosmos to be explored.

Lapteff considered the practicalities of applying the new mark across NASA's myriad applications.

The logo's simple lines help it scale from a logo on a tote bag to the livery on NASA's "Vomit Comet," its zero-G simulation plane.

Lapteff's logo concept makes NASA feel like an organization that can boldly go where no one has gone before.

The logo is minimal, but is recognizable even when shrunk to relatively small sizes.

And remains coherent when blown up and wrapped around the curved fuselage of a plane.