Space Systems Academic Group Coin

In 2012, the Space Systems Program Officer Jason ‘Suede’ Pratt issued a challenge coin design contest to the Space System Operations and Space Systems Engineering students at the Naval Postgraduate School. Out of more than a dozen submissions, designs by LT Justin Hendrix and LT Jeff Wilcox were chosen, one for each side of the coin.

The “Space Systems Academic Group” side of the coin has an NPS logo with a glow in the dark inset at the top. The center of the coin displays the globe with a swoosh representing an orbit and in the background are names of the the key stakeholders for the Space Systems curricula.

The other side of the coin has the names of the two curricula around the outside while the center includes key symbols of our curricula and space exploration: the seven glow in the dark stars of the asterism Ursa Major, a starry field of seven additional stars, one representing the Polaris North Star and one whose light is extinguished, symbolized with a lack of glow-in-the-dark enamel, to memorialize CAPT Alan Poindexter, Astronaut and Dean of Students who was tragically killed in an accident vacationing with his family that summer. Also shown is an Atlas V launch vehicle, which carried the first NPS CubeSat Launcher and 12 CubeSats to orbit, a CubeSat representing the work of many of the students in the field, and a crescent moon.