NASA has a meatball and a worm. The meatball—a sphere of stars, a red chevron, and a comet orbiting the agency’s acronym—came first, in 1959, and was attached to spacesuits and capsules. It was followed, in 1975, by the worm, just red letters, a sleek, curvilinear, futuristic logo. One says Lewis and Clark in space; the other says cool space station. The worm was praised—loved, even—until 1992, when a NASA administrator suddenly revived the meatball, thereby ditching the worm. Nevertheless, the worm persisted, living quietly in space on the sides of satellites and, on Earth, in the hearts of pro-worm people, especially in the design world. “I think a lot of people tried to kill it,” Hamish Smyth, a graphic designer, said during a recent visit to NASA’s headquarters, in…