Somehow, when you talk about space exploration, it seems like all the human-made projects have these incredible, inspiring names: Perseverance, Voyager, Challenger, Curiosity. That, however, isn’t a coincidence. NASA has been thoughtfully discussing and implementing policies for how they bestow official names on their spacecraft since the organization’s very beginnings in the 1960s.
The milestone of naming a mission or spacecraft is still met with fanfare today, as it marks a sort of officialization of the project—it makes it seem more real and gives the public a way to bring up a cutting edge science project in conversation. Recently, for example, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced names for its upcoming Lunar projects, which aim to get humans to the moon by 2030: a crew vessel named Mengzhuo (“dream vessel”) and a lander called Lanyue (“embracing the moon”).
So, how do these names come to be in the first place? Who decided to call NASA’s modern return to the moon Artemis, and where did CNSA come up with Lanyue?
The answer to that question depends on which space agency’s names you’re asking about, as there is no centralized authority a la airport code naming from the International Air Transport Association. “Names given to spaceflight projects and programs have originated from no single source or method. Some have their foundations in mythology and astrology, some in legend and folklore. Some have historic connotations. Some are based on a straightforward description of their mission,” explains the historical NASA document, “Origins of NASA Names” from 1976.
Lanyue, for example, comes from a 1965 Mao Zedong poem and was suggested by members of the Chinese public to capture the community’s spirit of reaching towards the moon. Another recent project—India’s Chandrayaan-2 and -3—also has a pretty literal meaning for a project traveling to the Moon. In Sanskrit, Chandrayaan…
Read the full article here