NASA’s two new Mars rovers have been named ‘Spirit’ and ‘Opportunity’. I’m just as much for getting schoolkids to name spacecraft as anyone else, but couldn’t they have picked anything more inspiring? It sounds as if the PC brigade had sucked all the life out of this competition well before it begun. They’re not terrible, but they’re hardly a patch compared to the evocative names of Voyager, Viking, Pathfinder and Galileo. Even ‘Beagle 2’ sounds better…
Adrian Hon
mssv 
At least NASA aren’t recycling spaceship names in the way they do with manned craft – for example, the two “Columbia”s (Apollo 11 Comand Module and Orbiter), the two “Challengers” (Apollo 17 LM and Orbiter) and the two “Endeavour”s (Apollo 15 Command Module and Orbiter). I always wondered why they did that – it’s not as if there’s a shortage of decent names.
I don’t know, I’d rather thay had “Voyager II” than “Pleasantry III”