Unlike most forshakking yintagh humans, International Space Station Commander Steve Swanson is not a piece of baktag. A sci-fi fan (naturally, he’s a professional spaceman, after all,) he recruited his daughter to help him design a special patch for the 40th ISS expedition that paid tribute to one of his favorite franchises. It combined the Klingon insignia with a Soyuz rocket, and replaced the Bat’leth in the original with the space station. Since the Klingons were an allegory for the Russians, who comprise most of Expedition 40, I’d say what they came up with was awesome:
Qapla’!
According to CollectSpace:
“He mentioned ‘Star Trek’ and the influence that television and movies about space travel have had on him and the youth of America, or the world even,” Mary Swanson [Steve’s wife] said, “and how [the patch] was paying homage to how that has stirred the imaginations of thousands of people and made them want to maybe become astronauts, or at least work in the space program.”
“It was a good thing,” she added. “It wasn’t promoting Star Trek or anything like that, but that it influenced him and he wanted to honor that.”
However, the ko’tals at NASA legal told Swanson that the potential copyright infringement lawsuits would not be worth the headache, GHUY’CHA. They changed the patch to remove all the Klingon elements, and it ended up looking like this:
No matter, Swanson made sure to work his Klingon allegiance in to ISS’s new Instagram account, demonstrating the lack of formal dress code that goes on in LEO.
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You’d think the powers that be would get their baktag together and endeavor to put out a version of the Klingon patch, Dor-Sho-Gah. It’s not like there aren’t millions of Trekkies who would buy such a thing.
Via FashionablyGeek
(Sincere thanks to The Mighty Fek’lar for teaching me so many forshakking Klingon swears over the years.)