Authors’ Notes
A Discussion on names:
When writing Boldly Going, we were confronted with the need to give names to the wide variety of vehicles that we had introduced, including the Shuttle-C OPAMs,
Kepler capsules, Lunar Landers, European ATV derived modules, and finally the Shuttle-IIs.
Working backwards, the Shuttle-II names remained in flux for quite a while, with the names being finalized only sometime in late December of 2020, resulting in the inadvertent reuse of the names from the movie
Armageddon (The intent being a joke that you end up with the orbiter
Freedom docking to the
Space Station Enterprise.) While we only named three of the 300 series orbiters, using
Freedom and
Independence as the first two operational units and
Spirit as the test article leads to the idea that they are broadly referred to as the
Spirit-Class Orbiters. Our thought is that the names selected for the first run of 4-5 operational vehicles would be names that fit with the scheme “Spirit of _”, and will probably seem like the historical names of Mars landers and helicopters. Indeed, part of the reason for the late December switch was that
Ingenuity had been grabbed from the list of Mars 2020/
Perseverance alternatives earlier in the year, and then we had to switch it to something else when it was selected in turn by JPL for the real helicopter. Additional orbiters beyond these may revert to more conventional names based on ships of exploration, but once again, that’s beyond the scope of the timeline. A potential bridge, though not one we’re canonizing, would be an OV-30X “Spirit of”
Discovery as it both fits the name scheme and would serve to honor TTL’s only lost orbiter.
One of the unmentioned bits that was worked out is that because the
Spirit Class Orbiters would not have the exact same mounting hardware as the original orbiters, the older NASA Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (SCA) - N905NA and N911NA would not have the correct mounting points for the new vehicles. NASA uses this to justify the purchase of two new, 747-8F derived transports, which would be designated N976NA and N977NA. In keeping with the numbering and the “
Spirit-class” naming scheme, these aircraft would be known as
The Spirit of ‘76 and
The Spirit of ‘77 respectively. The first is obviously named after the American Revolution, and the second after the
Enterprise Approach and Landing tests. The numbers are a happy coincidence, mostly selected to fit with the NASA aircraft registration scheme. Most FAA registered NASA aircraft use a three digit number with the NA suffix, with the first number designating the Center the aircraft are based out of, with 9 being the number for Johnson (4 is Wallops; 5 is Langley; 6 Lewis/Glenn; 7 is Ames; 8 is Dryden/Armstrong). After some digging, I (TimothyC) determined that N976NA and N977NA were both going to be available in the 2005-2020 time period. This will also allow NASA to retire the older 747-100(SR), and pipe the new aircraft for in-flight refueling from tankers during their construction, improving the national and international reach of Shuttle-II transport. These new SCAs are expected to have a long and productive life.
Moving on to the ATV derivatives, as was noted by
@Polish Eagle, the
Galileo Tug / Crew-Tended Free-Flyer / Station was named
entirely as a play on the name of the shuttle-craft from
Star Trek. We’re glad to see that someone spotted it.
Curie was picked for the module on
MIR-II because of that station’s greater focus on microgravity physics thanks to the ability of experiments to be placed closer to the station’s center of mass - rather than the labs on
Space Station Enterprise which tend to be located on the station’s edges, far from the best environment for microgravity research. The ATV resupply vehicles themselves are left unnamed, as there would have been close to thirty of the vehicles (one per year to
Enterprise and one every other year to
MIR-II) over the course of the timeline.
One name that was not available was
Leonardo, which was a late change to the name of the laboratory inside the
Enterprise payload bay, which in early drafts was called the “Enterprise European Laboratory Module” or EELM. That got to be a mouthful, and confusing when the Columbus module would be launched later. The resulting wordplay of using LEOnardo with Low Earth Orbit was too much for us to pass up.
The names for the
Kepler capsules were, like the ATV derivatives, selected from the names of various European figures. The selection of the class name was made fairly early on, as it was a name that was neither French, nor British, nor Italian, making it acceptable (if not preferred) to those nations that were paying for the design, had conceived of the design, and had sold the design to the rest of ESA. Once we confirmed that we would be naming the capsules after people, the name for the first lunar-capable capsule almost had to be the
Jules Verne, although there was some minor debate as to that being the first lunar-capable capsule, or the first capsule to go to the moon. In the end, it was slotted in as the first lunar capable vessel. The names that we ended up defining with certainty were
Johannes Kepler,
Charles Messier,
Edoardo Amaldi,
Jules Verne, &
Francesco Grimaldi. The first three were three of the four Kepler-E lifeboats that are cycled through year-long tours on Space Station Enterprise, and the later two are two of the Lunar-capable capsules. Further names were never selected, but the name
Issac Newton was likely used for one of the lunar-capable units.
The lander program naming selection of
Minerva has been gone over before, and we went over the selection of the name
Conestoga in the text in
Part 20.
OPAM naming ended up being a bit
fabulous in its subtlety. e of pi expressed a desire to name the first two American reusable heavy lift vehicles after two titans of American myth even before we started working on Boldly Going. Thus, when the naming opportunity presented itself, the names
Paul Bunyan and
John Henry were immediately used. As the timeline progressed, we needed to have additional names. In the process of discussing it, we discovered we had accidentally implied a naming scheme (at least on the meta level), and thus first had
George Washington and
Richard Byrd penciled in to complete the set. Later on, TimothyC suggested that to avoid confusion with other nationally significant named craft (read: USS
George Washington CVN-73) we instead name OV-203 and 204 the
George Meuller and
Richard Nixon respectively - for their contributions to the shuttle program. The first was met with acceptance. The second was met with the suggestion being ignored - repeatedly. The idea is that the names of the OPAMs start out as unofficial, but since the public reacts better to craft with names than those with just serial numbers, they become official as the OPAMs fly more. The
Richard Byrd is the craft that performs most of the Defense Department missions, and I am sure that the Intelligence Community loves the twenty-five foot wide payload fairing that Shuttle-C offers (five meter fairings allow for deployable antennas that are hundreds of meters wide and Shuttle-C is over half again as wide).
OV-105
Endeavour received the same name it did historically, because even with an American space station in service, we did not see a reason why the name would change. We would encourage people to read
From Ship to Shuttle: NASA Orbiter Naming Program, September 1988 - May 1989 for a better understanding of how the name was selected.