SSI T-Shirt Designs
- Matthew Nguyen
- Mar 22
- 3 min read
I first entered the T-shirt design competition for SSI's 10th anniversary celebration in hopes of winning a special SSI hoodie, only to find that I was the only person who submitted designs, but that led me to discover an interest in designing T shirts and has thus influenced over four years of SSI merch.
All the shirts have been designed using PaintDotNet and each one tells a unique story with unique inspiration.
The tricky part about designing shirts for SSI has always been the presence of seven teams within SSI, meaning designs need to be able to incorporate 7 team icons as equally as possible as well as the primary SSI logo separately from them.
Design 1: Ad Astra Per Aspera
The first shirt that I designed for SSI was for the SSI 10th anniversary celebration. It also lined up with the 20th anniversary of the loss of the Columbia Space Shuttle on mission STS-107. In honor of that, this design is based off of the mission patch for STS-114 -- the return to flight mission after the loss of Columbia with the phrase "Ad Astra Per Aspera" added meaning "to the stars through difficulties" representing both the struggles faced by NASA and a commonly used motto in SSI.
A small, but important design element that I pushed to keep over the design iterations was the Columba (the dove) Constellation, symbolizing peace on earth, the space shuttle Columbia, the crew members of STS-107, and to honor the original astronauts who paved the way to make research in space possible.
Special Edition 1: Mural
This first special edition shirt was based off of the mural outside of our lab space in End Station 3 on campus. Notably, this features an inverted color scheme with a red design on a white shirt in order to feel cooler in the desert sun when we were wearing these shirts on recovery missions at Friends of Amateur Rocketry in the Mojave Desert.
This design also features a special front logo to symbolize the workspace managers for SSI and the importance of the physical lab space in SSI.
Being the first special edition, this design does not feature the team icons, but does feature all of the teams via other visuals.
Design 2: EPCOT 35
Being a long time Disney fan with EPCOT being my all time favorite theme park, I saw the logo for the EPCOT 35th anniversary and thought I could turn this into an SSI design. This design is notable for being the only SSI shirt to feature the names of each of the teams in text. due to the single color design requirement, the stripes were replaced with shock waves in the pre-production design.
Design 3: IFT-1
This design saw very limited use due to the timing of the design. This design is based off of the launch graphic for the Starship test flight 1 depicting which ones of the Raptor engines was operational during the launch. The design itself was conceived about 2 years after the launch and was out of date by the time it would've been introduced. Instead, it saw a limited production of five of these shirts being manually printed by me on heat transfer vinyl.
Special Edition 2: NROL-39
This second special edition shirt is based on the mission patch for the spy satellite launched as part of NROL-39. I found the phrase "Nothing is Beyond Our Reach" to be fitting for SSI given the breadth of projects in the club and was even more fitting for the Operations team in SSI, whose work impacts everyone in SSI. Given that the first special edition SSI shirt also included an animal, the sinister imagery of an octopus engulfing the Earth makes for a good sequel to the friendly racoon welcoming you to the workspace
Design 4: Interstellar Endurance
Interstellar, directed by Christopher Nolan is my favorite movie of all time. I went as far as to go to a movie theater at midnight to watch it re-released in theaters on IMAX 70mm for the 10th anniversary of the film. The original designs were inspired by the mission patch for the endurance mission in the movie, but later designs evolved into just the spacecraft itself. This depiction of the spacecraft is from the legendary docking scene, showing the damage on the station after the failed docking attempt and allows for me to fill all of the nodes.
Design 5: Ursa Major
This design depicts the Big Dipper, part of the Ursa Major constellation, fitting for a team in California, with the SSI logo in the direction of Polaris, the North Star.
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