Expedition One Crew Wins Bid To Name Space Station Alpha

By Todd Halvorson
Cape Canaveral
Bureau Chief
posted: 10:30 am ET - 02 November 2000    

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The International Space Station at long last has a real name -- or at least a radio call sign -- a moniker for a mythical mountaintop where mere mortals could make contact with other worlds above.

In a gutsy bid to get bureaucrats to deal with a political hot potato, U.S. astronaut Bill Shepherd -- the station's first full-time commander -- boldly asked for a go-ahead to christen the outpost "Alpha" just hours after arriving at the complex Thursday.

The intrepid move came during the first official exchange between the so-called Expedition One Crew and dignitaries gathered at the Russian Mission Control Center outside Moscow.

"The first expedition on space station requests permission to take the radio call sign 'Alpha,'" Shepherd said in a space-to-ground conversation with NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin.

A seemingly stunned Goldin let out a nervous laugh and paused as Shepherd pumped his fist in the air and then clasped hands with Russian cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev in a show of crew unity.

"Temporarily, take it as Alpha," Goldin replied as a spontaneous burst of applause erupted in the Russian control center. "Go ahead. Have a good day."

"Spasiba balshoy," Shepherd responded, using the Russian words for "Thank you very much."

"You've been pushing real hard," Goldin added.

To say the least.
Shepherd, 51, has been pestering project managers for years to give the orbiting outpost a real name, something other than "International Space Station," or the ho-hum acronym ISS, which is pronounced letter by letter.

Shepherd -- a former Navy SEAL -- even went so far as to raise the topic on the eve of his crew's launch Tuesday from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

"For thousands of years, humans have been going to sea in ships," the veteran astronaut told reporters during a traditional pre-launch news conference earlier this week.

"People have designed and built these vessels, launched them with a good feeling that a name will bring good fortune to the crew and success to their voyage," he added. "We're waiting for some decision from our managers as to whether we will follow that tradition or not."

That's not to say, however, that the station has never had a real name.

The administration of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan -- which first proposed the project in 1984 -- dubbed the station "Freedom," but that name was dropped after Bill Clinton took office eight years later.

The outpost, in fact, was known as "Alpha" for about a year -- an unofficial name given to the station after the Clinton administration ordered sweeping project changes in 1992. Shepherd, incidentally, played a key role in the redesign effort that led to that name.

The Alpha moniker, however, was abandoned quietly after the Russians were brought into the project and independent analysts started referring to the outpost as "Ralpha."

NASA officials since then have consistently dodged the thorny issue, fearing that all 16 nations involved in the station project could not reach a politically and culturally correct consensus on an appropriate name for the outpost.

A joint effort of space agencies in the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, Canada and Brazil, the station project involves about 100,000 workers on four continents.

To Shepherd and his crew, Alpha is an extraordinarily suitable name.

"What I like with Alpha's name is that it's kind of going back to the Greek language, the Greek alphabet," Krikalev said prior to flight. "It's not specifically Russian or English. And it's also going back to human history."

But there's one other overriding reason that the Expedition One crew likes the name -- and that is its place in ancient Greek mythology.

"It had something to do with a mythical mountain where humans went to gain contact with the heavens," Shepherd said in a preflight interview with SPACE.com. "It was a landmark of such magnitude that it allowed contact between the terrestrial and the heavenly world."

Whether the name sticks now remains to be seen. But Goldin gave his blessing to it for the duration of the crew's four-month stay at the international station.

"I'll authorize (the name) station Alpha for the entire Expedition One mission," Goldin ultimately told Shepherd and his crew. "Now you can sleep well at night and not have any concerns."

"Well, thank you sir," Shepherd replied. "I think there are about 100,000 people on the ground who now know what the name of the station is."