Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

During an episode in the second season of the award-winning television show The West Wing, Martin Sheen’s Jed Bartlet is discussing Galileo V, a fictitious NASA mission with his press secretary C.J. Cregg (played by Allison Janney). During the exchange, Barlet notes that “NASA’s great at naming things.” As an example, the enigmatic president cites Mercury, Apollo, Atlantis, the Sea of Tranquility, and the Ocean of Storms. He explains that with just a great name, “Your imagination, like a child’s will explode with unrestrained possibilities.”

In addition to loving the show in general, this scene, in particular, stuck with me long after I had watched it. I had always felt that NASA was unmatched in their efforts to inspire with every aspect of their work. From the simplicity of a great name to the complexity of near-impossible technological advancements. So after discovering the fantastic scene once more, I decided to take a closer look at some of the greatest examples of NASA mission and program designations.

Almost all early NASA projects were named after Roman or Greek mythology. Mercury, Gemini and Apollo were the agency’s first three major programmes spanning the first decade or more of the agency’s efforts. The names echoed NASA’s growth from an amalgamation of the many into a single voice. They built on standards set by the airforce with names like Atlas and Jupiter. Not ambitious but nonetheless striking. The names had a strong relationship with the stars and a reverence that seemed to allow the otherworldly powers of the gods to inhabit these early NASA machines. I mean, how could Apollo fail to guide us to the moon when he had ensured the sun rose without fail for millennia.

As the 1970s rolled in, the Apollo program and the spotlight of the world that it attracted were in their final act. The decade called for something equally ambitious. It called for something that would extend the reach of humanity beyond our own solar system. Enter the Voyager program. Two spacecraft launched in opposite directions that would carry a highlight reel of humanity (the Golden Record) millions of miles into the unknown. What better name than Voyager for a pair of spacecraft that would embark on the greatest voyage ever conceived. The name also marked a break from the mythology-based names of the 1960s and a step into the future.

With the end of the Apollo program approaching, the 1970s also saw NASA look to the future of crewed space travel. With a mandate to produce a vehicle that was reusable with commercial applications, the space shuttle was born. A total of six space shuttles were built. Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour. Enterprise was named after the fictitious USS Enterprise from the television show Star Trek. The five others were named after historical seafaring ships; the Columbia Rediviva, HMS Challenger, HMS Discovery, RV Atlantis, and HMS Endeavour. There is a certain amount of humour in the fact that the shuttle that was never launched was named after a fictitious starship, while the five that entered service were named after historic ships.

Although Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour built on and added to the legacy of their historical counterparts, Columbia and Challenger would leave the names haunted. These names now carry an awful burden. They are uttered with a heavy heart and great reverence for the men and women who lost their lives. Columbia and Challenger have become an important lesson teaching us that names can take on a life of their own. A life far beyond the vehicles or programs they were attached to.

While Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour opened Earth’s orbit to humanity, Pathfinder became the first to explore the dusty landscape of Mars. What a perfect name for the agency’s first mission to Mars. Pathfinder would pave the way for future missions to the Red Planet and beyond collecting approximately 9 million individual points of data including thousands of images.

Pathfinder was the second mission launched under NASA’s Discovery Program. The program was focused on lower-cost highly focused scientific missions. It would also become a source of some truly great names. Over the next 20 plus years, the program would launch the Lunar Prospector, Genesis, Stardust, MESSENGER, New Horizons and Dawn to name just a few. The names had shed many of the previous NASA conventions and in some cases adopted “forced” acronyms. MESSENGER, for instance, was a contraction of MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging. Although a little silly, the resulting name stands well on its own.

Towards the end of the 20th century, NASA would adopt one of their most recent naming conventions. This would see the agency name missions after men and women who had made significant contributions to the field. NASA’s Great Observatories program is a great example of the convention. Four telescopes have been built for the program thus far. The Spitzer Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory, Compton Gamma Ray Observatory and, of course, the Hubble Space Telescope. The four space observatories honour Lyman Spitzer (credited with conceiving the idea of telescopes in space), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (Nobel Prize winner for Physics), Arthur Compton (Nobel Prize winner for Physics) and Edwin Hubble (played a role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology) respectively.

The list really does just go on. Curiosity, Spirit, Opportunity, Phoenix, Galileo, InSight, Orion, Mars Odyssey, Deep Impact, Mariner and more. NASA’s legacy is one built on great names. Great names and a mission to boldly go where no man has gone before.