The UCF football program will celebrate its connection to the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station for the eighth consecutive season by wearing space-themed uniforms against Arizona on Nov. 2.
Entitled “Mission VIII,” the black-to-gray gradient uniforms represent lunar regolith – or dust and rocks that cover the surface of the Moon – and feature the Pegasus and Orion constellations on the sleeve caps, which were both included in previous iterations.
The jerseys feature white numbers with silver and Canaveral blue drop shadows, the latter of which symbolize the sea and the sky along the Space Coast, while the gray pants include a mission patch on the hip and stripes that match the design of rocket boosters.
The black helmets, meanwhile, displays UCF’s stacked logo with Canaveral blue accents and lunar dust speckles on the sides, while the front bumper includes a “SpaceU” wordmark and the back bumper promotes the university’s motto of “Reach for the Stars.”
The back bumper, player identification numbers and Big XII logo are also rendered in Canaveral blue, as are the various mission patch logos, which act as a stripe down the center of the helmet and show which “missions” that individual player was a part of.
UCF is home to the world’s largest simulated lunar surface, known as the Exolith Lab, which allows companies, scientist, faculty and students to test how moon dust interacts with hardware that powers space missions.
The lab features more than 120 tons of regolith, replicating the moon’s South Pole, where NASA’s Artemis program plans to land in 2026. If successful, it would be the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.
The Knights are 7-0 in their annual Space Game, with a 63-21 win over East Carolina in 2017, 52-40 over Temple in 2018, 44-29 win over Houston in 2019, 51-34 win over Tulane in 2020, 24-7 win over Memphis in 2021, 70-13 win over Temple in 2022 and 45-3 win over Oklahoma State last fall.
This is the second time that a college football program has honored the Artemis program, specifically, as the Rice Owls donned space-themed uniforms in 2022 in remembrance of former president John F. Kennedy’s “Moon Shot” speech.
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