Name an ESA Space Mission

Posted on by John Holst

The European Space Agency (ESA) has a mission for you, should you be willing to accept, and perhaps have a creative flair.  They would love for you to give their mission a name in a challenge imaginatively titled “Name That Mission.”  The mission will be an ESA astronaut (shouldn’t the Europeans have a different name for their space operators–the Russians have cosmonaut) operating as the flight engineer on a Soyuz spacecraft.  They didn’t really clarify what he’d be doing.

The 2015 mission will last about ten days as the astronaut and spacecraft orbit the Earth.  The astronaut is a Dane named Andreas Mogenson.  In the ESA video above, Mogenson is asking for your help to name his mission.  You can go to this page to read the details of ESA’s “Name That Mission” challenge.

The challenge will be accepting candidate mission names until 1100 GMT on 24 March, 2015.  And alas, only citizens from ESA member states can be in this “naming of missions.”  Leaves me out for sure.  And I had some good ones, too, like “Intergalactic Planetary.”  Perhaps “Millenium Raptor?”  Or, the more obvious “Spaceball 1?”  Maybe, at the very least, they’ll put a bumper sticker on the back…you know the one:

“We Brake For Nobody”

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Published by John Holst

Ill-Defined Space is written by me, John Holst. ​If you’ve ever asked the following question, “What is this commercial space industry thing?” then welcome to my world. I will never have the answer to that question, but I do offer insights based on my industry experience and observations. I’ve tried defining, decrypting, deciphering, analyzing, and then translating the endless stream of the world’s space industry activities, policies, and press releases. I’ve experienced varying degrees of success in my attempts to do so. The upshot is that if you want thoughtful, occasionally useful, observations about the world’s space industry, then you may want to read my analyses. Boring, but potentially credibility-building information follows: I have a Master’s in Commercial Enterprise in Space through the Florida Institute of Technology. I was an undergrad at the University of Washington in Seattle, graduating from there with a degree in Journalism. My analysis of the space industry has been a definitive source for national lawmakers and departments, news outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg, and the San Francisco Chronicle, publications like National Geographic, and National Public Radio. It’s been published in The Space Report: The Authoritative Guide to Global Space Activity from 2014-2023 (here’s a link to a 1Q19 promo copy). You can also see my work in Quilty Analytic’s series of LEO Broadband Reports. ​ I’ve worked in the United States Air Force, Missile Defense Agency, Cobham, Space Dynamics Laboratory, the Space Foundation, and Quilty Analytics. I focused on space operations in the first few and conducted space industry research and analysis with the last two.