A Mundane Spacecraft Name Game

May 29, 2009

I hope there are no martian cats at the landing site where the multi-billion dollar Mars Science Lab (MSL) will touchdown in 2011.

Why? Because the lander has been named Curiosity, in a NASA contest where 9,000 students across the country submitted essays for their favorite name.

And, we all know what curiosity did to the cat.

 

I don’t mean to detract from the imagination of the Midwestern sixth-grader who submitted the winning name. In fact, her accompanying essay was beautifully written and compelling to the judges. But NASA is getting mushy in its 50-year old middle age.

When I was a student the magnificent first wave of interplanetary missions bore names like Ranger, Surveyor, Mariner, Viking, and Voyager. These were exciting  and inspiring names. You felt emotionally bolstered that these interplanetary ambassadors were going to succeed in their missions, come hell or high water. 

Then NASA decided to engage the public and especially students in naming contests for spacecraft. But NASA’s credibility was tarnished in the recent Steven Colbert fiasco when the agency weaseled out of naming an International Space Station module after him. The comedian won fair and square in the voting contest.  

Instead, NASA came up with a ho-hum name: Tranquility.  zzzzzzz. I'd prefer that the module been named Motel 6, Winnebago, or Paris Hilton. What's ironic is that the ISS itself is not named after anyone. I'd suggest the James Webb International Space Station, but the name's already taken (more later).

The pair of Mars Exploration Rovers that bounced in for a landing in 2004 offered a wonderful opportunity for a clever pairing of names. My choice was Lewis & Clark. Or, if you’re a comic book fan, Lois & Clark (aka Superman). Any number of celebrity pairs would have personified the rovers: Lucy & Ethel, Abbott & Costello, Lone Ranger & Tonto, Mork & Mindy, Kirk & Spock, Thelma & Louise, or Beavis & Butt-Head.

A charming 9-year old Russian immigrant named them Spirit and Opportunity. The names were selected from 10,000 contest entries. Imagine the news copy: “Mission scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory today had an opportunity to direct the rover Opportunity into a shallow crater, giving it an opportunity to image sedimentary features on the 3 billion year-old landscape.”

Just when I though this could not get any more mawkish, Curiosity  comes along and just makes things, well, more curious. The name simply doesn’t elicit any cultural  or historic gravitas, nor, alternatively,  playful humor or personification.

Just imagine:

“Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Curiosity has landed.”

or,

“These are the voyagers of the starship, Curiosity, its five years mission to explore strange new worlds . . .”

The lore and legend of Mars is so rich, the mobile lab could have been named Sagan, Lowell, Wells, Clarke, Bradbury, etc. Or, just for fun, Wall-E Too, or Sponge Bob (looking for water!).

The Discovery Channel had and excellent program several years ago called "Alien Planet," which realistically portrayed a hypothetical future robotic mission to an extrasolar planet that is crawling with life. The balloon-like probes that explored the surface were named after Issac Newton and Leonardo DaVinci. They were nicknamed Ike and Leo, and so personified I was almost in tears when they succumbed to the predatory life forms on the savage world. 

The orbiting NASA Great Observatories have had their own idiosyncratic history of naming.

In 1983 NASA’s Space Telescope was renamed the Hubble Space Telescope after astronomer Edwin P. Hubble. Curiously, this happened two years before the planned launch. 

Legend is that NASA wanted to name it before the new, maverick director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, Riccardo Giacconi, named it the Galileo Space Telescope or something unpalatable to the space agency. 

In the late 1970s Giacconi unofficially named the High Energy Astrophysical Observatory-2, Einstein.  The name stuck, much to NASA’s chagrin. They wanted to save the name Einstein for a bigger astrophysics mission.

I didn’t like the name “Hubble” at first. It sounded like a chewing gum, cheese snack, or one of those drinks with a little parasol.  “I’ll have a strawberry Hubble please.” What’s more, “Hubble” rhymes with “trouble.” The rest is history.

Writing news copy is just as problematic: “The Hubble Space Telescope has made a new precise measurement of the Hubble constant, the expansion rate of the universe first discovered by Edwin Hubble.”

Astronomers hoped to name HST’s successor, the Next Generation Space Telescope, after Princeton astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer. But NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe preempted everybody and named it after Apollo-era NASA administrator James E. Webb.

There will be endless confusion once Webb is launched in 2014: “The Webb Space Telescope today photograph galactic structure in the cosmic web, the pictures are now posted on the Webb’s website.”

The Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) was instead named after Spitzer, and only after it was successfully launched in 2003. The Spitzer Space Telescope (SST) discoveries were easy to follow on the internet until 2008 when ex-New York State Governor Elliot Spitzer made headlines in a sex scandal, and mucked up Google searches for SST news stories.

The sole bastion for fun in astronomical naming lies with the folks like Caltech astronomer Mike Brown who has nicknamed  a number of  Pluto-sized worlds that he’s discovered in the Kuiper belt. 

My favorites are Santa, and Xena (after the early 1990s TV sci-fi warrior princess).  The old fuddy-duddies at the International Astronomical Union gave real names to these dwarf planets. But unlike Curiosity, Xena got your attention, at least until the world was renamed Eris (the Greek goddess of discord and strife, that personifies the Pluto debate). 

In one unsolicited e-mail I received a few years back, an amateur astronomer proposed that the dwarf planet was thermally “breathing” because he thought it changed size between observations. “Now this is not as exciting as watching Lucy Lawless (aka Xena) breathing, but interesting none the less,” he wrote.

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Invader Xan]

:)

In fairness, it has to be said that even sappy names are names nonetheless. I'm still irked that history is going to remember uninspired names like "Space Ship One"...

[Cat Jones]

I failed to submit my ideas when they had the contest for entries to name the space rovers, so I really can not complain about "Spirit" and "Opportunity". My thing with their "activities" on the Red Planet is that I wish that they were spending more time exploring the actual possibility of having a manned station on Mars. What would we really need for such an endeavor? Will the actions of these rovers, as initiated by human spirits, allow for the opportunities to get actual people to the Red Planet within tangible time limits?

If it does turn out that exploring regions beyond our Earth does have actual importance, I realize that getting to and possibly settling upon Mars will be a necessary step. Are we turning over rocks to find out whether or not it is possible to have humans on Mars for extended stays? Are we finding that there may be resources on World 4 that may be useful for us, while in the midst of our rapidly depleting Earth?

I can go on and on! I enjoy your blog, and I will visit again. I hope that you can get around to doing the same! Take care!

Cat
http://www.createfreeblogs.com/catigula/

[Ted]

I don't think there's anything wrong with names like "Space Ship One." I mean, not all names of feats have to be named with something clever. Sometimes just a plain old boring logistical name will do.

[Don]

Another great article, Ray! I think one of the best spacecraft names was the one NASA chose for the Mars Surveyor 2001 orbiter: "2001 Mars Odyssey" which is a tribute to Arthur C. Clark.