Picture man landing on the Moon and somewhere in the image there’s probably an iconic emblem: the American flag. But a Swedish design student thinks that a national flag alone doesn’t suffice for space missions. When they venture beyond our planet, astronauts are not only representatives of their own country; they are ambassadors for Earth. So 24-year-old Oskar Pernefeldt has designed a new flag, the International Flag of Planet Earth. Pernefeldt told motherboard.vice.com the idea started when he thought of how the flags we use now were originally used at sea, and we’re now voyaging in a different space.
“We are sailing in a different kind of water now, so it should be relevant for our spacecrafts to have a flag where we come from, and we come from Earth," he said. “I think it’s a bit weird, ethically, to have different countries’ flags when we’re cooperating as much as we’re doing. The space race is over.” He sees the flag being used when humans go to Mars, to represent the Earth and remind people that we share the planet.
How do you design a single flag that represents all the nations of the planet? Pernefeldt said he started by doing illustrations of the Earth itself, but they weren’t inspirational. Pernefeldt wanted something more “motivational”. The interlocking ring design he decided on symbolises a flower, which stands for life on Earth, and is also meant to suggest connectedness. He said he wanted “to show that our life is connected and what we do has consequences, if it’s negative or positive.” The blue colour is meant to represent the ocean. Pernefeldt said he stuck to the general customs of vexillography rather than making anything crazy.
