During his 1984 State of the Union speech , President Reagan announcedthat the U.S. would build a Modern for good manned outer space station within a decade . The Space Shuttle programme was underway , and a permanent blank place seemed like the next consistent stair in our bluff pushing into the last frontier . It did n’t suffer that the Russians were already working onMir , and America did n’t want to face like it was resting on its Laurel .
By 1988 ( two years after the launch of Mir ) , the American space station project had progressed to the decimal point that it hail time to name it . NASA came up with sixteen possibilities , include everything from Olympia to Pilgrim , and pose President Reagan with the choice along with different explanation for each one .
David S. F. Portree over at Wired ’s very excellentBeyond Apolloblog has cut into up the sixteen public figure that NASA view . As Portree write , the Space Station Name Committee appointed by Reagan laid out the specific rules for naming it :
The naming convention were straightforward . Candidate names were to be simple and well articulate , not refer to living persons , neither duplicate nor closely resemble NASA or non - NASA space program names , be translatable into the languages of the International Partners , and have neither ambiguous nor offensive meanings in the International Partner linguistic communication . In addition , acronym were to be avoided . The name process was not to be revealed to the public ; if , however , members of the world happened to submit names , the Name Committee would view them .
With that many rules , the names all pass into just a fistful of class , including god and goddesses , some astronomical wordplay , and lots of freedom - screw ideological buzzwords . The list is below .
Hercules
Minerva
Aurora
Jupiter
Pegasus
capital of Washington
Earth - Star
Starlight
Landmark
Pilgrim
Prospector
Skybase
Independence
autonomy
Unity
exemption
Perhaps unsurprisingly , Reagan prefer the nameSpace Station Freedomin July of 1988 . Freedom , as we all know , is n’t spare , and the projection ran into some financial backing difficulties in the former 1990s . By 1993 the Clinton brass re - judge the space station plan and the labor was fold into what would become known as theInternational Space Station ; a suitable and inclusive name indeed — albeit nowhere near as play as Pegasus . [ Beyond Apollo ]
Image:1991 renderingof Space Station Freedom by artist Tom Buzbee
Bill ClintonNASApaleofutureRonald Reaganspace history
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