Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn't Know About Combadges
4. The Origin Of The Design
The familiar shape of Starfleet’s combadges was canonically an evolution of the Starfleet logo that some officers used to wear as patches on their arms around the time of Star Trek: Enterprise. Eventually, Starfleet dropped the background, leaving just the yellow pointer in the centre, much like how modern real-life logos seem to simplify over time.
The old United Earth logo itself seems to be an evolution of NASA’s logo. It has the same circular shape, starry background, and pointer in the centre, but slightly simplified with the removal of the white orbital shape and letters.
NASA and other modern-day space organisations are about as close as we have Starfleet right now, so it makes sense that certain design elements from them would make their way into the future. Also, in a great example of reality mirroring fiction, The United States recently revealed the logo for it’s new Space Force, which includes an arrowhead design much closer to the look of combadges than NASA’s logo. This design was probably taken from elements of the shield for the Air Force Space Command that was created in the 80s, but it’s unknown whether or not that original design was inspired by Trek or merely similar by coincidence.