NASA’s logo and images are often used for branding fashion items and other commercial purposes, nevertheless, the agency doesn’t agree with their content being used for NFTs or anything similar.
To be fair, NASA was indirectly involved with building a 3D model of Mars using data from space agencies. It was the NFT-backed metaverse project “mars4”.
However, they have a strong opinion when it comes to the cryptocurrency world. The guidelines read:
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NASA is not approving any merchandising applications involving Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), as they are not consistent with the categories of products the Agency is approved to merchandise.
Besides the NFTs, the guidelines forbid merchandising on technology, and simpler products such as alcohol, tobacco, even food, and underwear.
Even though the agreement among degen apes (Solana-based NFT collection of unique apes), is indicating that NFTs are transferring to the legendary moon, NASA was quick to say that the agency “does not wish for its images to be used for these purposes”.
The agency's logos are copyrighted, and can only be used if approved by NASA. Also, their clarification was significantly important as the US government agencies’ images, and content, differently than the logo, isn’t copyright protected, and can be used for a lot of purposes in media.
To wrap things up, NASA has stated, that despite the OpenSea posting record volumes in January already - they do not wish for any of its content to be tokenized:
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are, in essence, digital tokens owned by someone as a ‘one of a kind’ digital asset. NASA does not wish for its images to be used for these purposes. It is unlawful to falsely claim copyright or other rights in NASA material.
That was a statement, that cleared all of the speculations about the space agency's opinion on the topic.
