NASA blasts NFTs: Says they won't take off with its imagery

Despite a general consensus amongst degen apes that NFTs are headed to the proverbial moon, space agency NASA has revealed it will not clear the use of its content and logos for take off.

This is an important clarification as the US government agencies’ images and video content are typically not copyright protected, and can ordinarily be freely used for educational and informative purposes in media. (Its logos meanwhile are copyrighted and can only be used if approved by NASA).

While the NFT sector continues to surge full steam ahead — with platforms such as OpenSea posting record monthly volumes in January already — NASA has stated via its media usage guidelines that it does 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.”

NASA’s logo has often been used for commercial purposes such as branding on fashion items, however the agency stated that it is unable to approve of any such uses in the NFT sphere.

“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,” the guidelines read.

Under the guidelines set out for government agencies, it is not able to approve merchandising or products in areas such as alcohol, food, cosmetics, tobacco, underwear and technology.

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NASA has however, been indirectly involved in the NFT space via other avenues in the past. Cointelegraph reported about an NFT-backed metaverse project dubbed “mars4” that built a detailed 3D model of Mars using data from NASA and other space agencies.