The Gods on the Launch Pad

In 1960, a NASA engineer named Abe Silverstein went home one evening, opened a book of mythology, and found a name for the program that would carry Americans to the Moon.

He chose Apollo. The god, as Silverstein pictured him, rode his chariot across the sun, and that seemed “appropriate to the grand scale of the proposed program.” It was not the first time NASA had gone to the ancient world for a name, and it would not be the last.

The messenger

America’s first program to put a person in space was called Mercury. Silverstein suggested that name too, and NASA announced it in December 1958. Mercury was the Roman messenger of the gods, quick and winged, always traveling between heaven and earth. For a capsule built to carry one man up and bring him safely back, it was hard to improve on.

The twins

The next program carried two astronauts at a time. In January 1962, Alex Nagy of NASA Headquarters suggested Gemini, the Latin word for twins. He was thinking of Castor and Pollux, the twin stars of the constellation, which seemed to him a fitting emblem for a crew of two.

The sister

The last Apollo crew to walk on the Moon, in December 1972, wore the god’s own profile on their mission patch, copied from a Roman statue. Then no one went back for half a century.

When NASA announced its return to the Moon in May 2019, the administrator, Jim Bridenstine, needed a name that would answer Apollo without repeating it. “It turns out that Apollo had a twin sister, Artemis,” he said. “She happens to be the goddess of the moon.” Her brother had the sun; she had the night sky. This April, Artemis II carried four astronauts around the Moon and home again, the first crew to travel there since 1972. The family was reunited.

Why the ancients?

NASA could have numbered its programs, or named them after engineers. Silverstein once said he named a spacecraft the way he would name a baby, and parents rarely choose a serial number. A name from the ancient world says that the thing being built belongs to a story older than any budget. It also travels well. Even the word astronaut is Greek: a sailor among the stars.

For a student who wonders whether Latin and Greek are of any use, here is a curious fact. The most forward-looking institution of the twentieth century kept reaching backward for its words. When people set out to do something no one had done before, they went looking for a name that had lasted.