Space boy names
Two ways onto this page and no third: the name is a thing in the sky — a constellation, a moon, a Titan the astronomers borrowed — or it belongs unmistakably to one person who got us off the ground.
- Orionoh-RY-unConstellation
The most recognisable constellation in the northern winter sky: three belt stars in a row, red Betelgeuse at the shoulder, blue-white Rigel at the foot.
- AtlasAT-lusSky object
A Titan, a star in the Pleiades, a small shepherd moon of Saturn, and the rocket family that put John Glenn in orbit. Currently #75 in the United States.
- LeoLEE-ohConstellation
The zodiac constellation, with Regulus at the base of its sickle and the Leonid meteors arriving out of it every November. #19 in the United States.
- Apollouh-POL-ohProgramme
Eleven crewed missions and six Moon landings between 1968 and 1972. NASA borrowed the god's name and made it the most famous word in spaceflight.
- YuriYOO-reeCosmonaut
Yuri Gagarin, the first human being in space: one orbit aboard Vostok 1 on 12 April 1961, and back on the ground in under two hours.
- AlanAL-unAstronaut
Alan Shepard, the first American in space on 5 May 1961, and ten years later the fifth man to walk on the Moon — the one who hit the golf ball.
- JohnJONAstronaut
John Glenn made three orbits in Friendship 7 on 20 February 1962 and went back up on the shuttle in 1998 at the age of seventy-seven.
- NeilNEELAstronaut
Neil Armstrong, commander of Apollo 11 and the first person to stand on another world, at the Sea of Tranquillity on 20 July 1969.
- MichaelMY-kulAstronaut
Michael Collins flew Apollo 11's command module and spent the landing alone in lunar orbit, out of radio contact behind the Moon on every pass.
- EdwinED-winAstronaut
Two claims at once. Edwin Aldrin, who has gone by Buzz since childhood, walked on the Moon second; Edwin Hubble showed that the spiral nebulae are other galaxies.
- Alexeiah-lek-SAYCosmonaut
Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk on 18 March 1965, then found his suit had stiffened too much to fit back through the airlock and had to bleed air out of it.
- FrankFRANKAstronaut
Frank Borman commanded Apollo 8, the first crew to leave Earth orbit and go round the Moon, over Christmas 1968.
- Konstantinkon-stun-TEENRocketry
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky derived the rocket equation and published it in 1903, working as a provincial schoolmaster in Kaluga decades before anyone could act on it.
- RobertROB-ertRocketry
Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fuelled rocket from a field in Auburn, Massachusetts, on 16 March 1926. It flew for two and a half seconds.
- Sergeisir-GAYRocketry
Sergei Korolev built Sputnik, Vostok and the programme that flew Gagarin, and the Soviet state kept his name secret until after he died.
- IsaacEYE-zikAstronomer
Isaac Newton's Principia of 1687 supplied the inverse-square law of gravitation that every orbit, natural or engineered, still obeys.
- NicholasNIK-uh-lusAstronomer
Nicolaus Copernicus moved the Sun to the centre in De revolutionibus, printed in 1543, the year he died.
- Giovannijoh-VAH-neeAstronomer
Giovanni Cassini found four of Saturn's moons and the dark gap in its rings that has carried his name ever since.
Why this is the shortest list on the site
Eighteen entries, and only four of them are objects. That is not an oversight. English is poor in boy names that actually name something in the sky: the planets are Roman gods that nobody gives to children, and the bright stars mostly carry Arabic names — Rigel, Altair, Deneb, Aldebaran — that have never crossed over into use. Orion, Atlas and Leo are close to the whole supply, and padding past them would mean pretending.
So the second gate is a person, and it has to be a person the name calls to mind on its own. Yuri, Alexei, Konstantin and Neil pass that easily; an English speaker who meets one of them thinks of Gagarin, Leonov, Tsiolkovsky and Armstrong before anything else. John, Michael and Robert pass it much less easily. Glenn, Collins and Goddard are real and the association is genuine, but these are three of the commonest names in the language, and a nod that quiet is usually better placed in the middle-name slot than the first.
What is deliberately absent is the padding this category normally runs on: names that merely mean "star" or "sky" in some language. Hōkū is Hawaiian for star and Dhruv is the Sanskrit name of the Pole Star, and both are excellent names — but meaning a star and being one are different claims, and mixing them is how a space list quietly turns into a list of pretty words. Those belong on names that mean star and names that mean sky, where the etymology is the point.
One practical note on the four sky names. Atlas and Leo are both inside the current U.S. top 100, so they are not the rarities the theme suggests; Orion and Apollo sit outside it and carry more of the intended weight. All four are also mythological, which means the same name is doing two jobs at once — see the mythology list for the other half of the story.