I was wondering about the naming convention of the various rockets (and the capsules) from times past.
The names of the shuttles I have seen done on spaceflight now, so it is not them I was wondering about. The ET and the SRFB of shuttle have "does what it says on the tin" names (UK readers should get that reference )
But where did Saturn come from, or Titan, or the Russian rocket names or the Arianne
Did the US, Russian and ESA have set naming conventions or were they the whim of the chief project engineer?
If you had the gift to name a rocket, what would you call it?
Fame - Glory - Adventure, A Cyber Warrior Craves Not these things
Post by Al Johnston on Aug 15, 2005 15:46:37 GMT -4
I don't think there's an overriding convention for rocket names: it's hardly the most important parameter.
Saturn was von Braun's next design after his Jupiter. It's perhaps as well that a "Uranus" was never required.
Titan was a USAF ballistic missile, like Atlas. Clearly, they were on a Greek mythology theme at the time, one they abandoned with Minuteman, choosing patriotic history instead.
The Russians mainly went for patriotic/geographical names: Soyuz means Union (as in Soyuz Sovietski Socialistichki Republiki) Vostok meant East, Voskhod Eastern. Of late, their boosters have had more scientific sounding names like Proton or Energia.
Ariane is the French form of Ariadne who led Perseus out of the minotaur's labyrinth.
The Chinese chose to honour their history with the Long March series, but I've no idea what their current booster is called.
If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple we couldn't
The early US launch vehicles were mostly given names from mythology, the unfortunate Vanguard being an exception. This trend is still present in Pegasus, Taurus, Minotaur and Athena. "Pioneering" names, eg Scout, probably honour American history. Delta, originally the name of the upper stage, came from either the Greek or phonetic alphabets.
The Russian rocket names were actually applied retrospectively. The original names were generally alphanumeric, either from the design bureau, eg UR-500, of the ministry production code, eg 8K82K. The popular names, eg Proton, were usually from the first acknowledged payload. Giving popular names to rockets only really got going when they started to market their launch services in the late 1980s.
The Chinese still use variants of Long March for most of their launch vehicles.