A Brief History
On April 14, 2023, the European Space Agency launched a spacecraft to explore the Moons of Jupiter, aptly naming the craft JUICE, an acronym for “Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer.” As space travel is about the coolest form of travel, we look at some real and fictional names of spacecraft in order to find the best name of them all.
Digging Deeper
Fictional: Enterprise, from TV and the movies’ Star Trek.
Real: Enterprise, a US Space Shuttle.
Fictional: Jupiter 2 from the TV show, Lost in Space. What happened to Jupiter 1?
Real: Crew Dragon, a series of shuttles to the ISS made by SpaceX.
Fictional: Millennium Falcon from the Star Wars franchise.
Real: Shenzhou, a Chinese spacecraft that means “Divine Vessel.”
Fictional: Battlestar Galactica, from the two TV series.
Real: Starship, another SpaceX contribution launched by the Starship booster.
Question for students (and subscribers): What would you name a spacecraft? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Gorn, Michael and Giuseppe de Chiara. Spacecraft: 100 Iconic Rockets, Shuttles, and Satellites That Put Us in Space. Voyageur Press, 2018.
Harrison, Malcolm, and Harry Edwards. Spacecraft in Fact and Fiction. Exeter Books, 1979.
The featured image in this article, a photograph of the Ariane 5 launch of the ESA Juice spacecraft, is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
You can also watch video versions of this article on YouTube.
