Alien invasions make for great stories, but they don't make one lick of common sense. People hear about D-Day, and they think, "Wow, spacemen could do that! Or we could do that to a spaceman planet! In space!" But invading another world isn't like hopping a plane and jumping out, there's enormous energies involved, carefully calculated math, long travel times. If you've got the energy to travel across the stars, frankly, you don't *need* anything Earth could offer you, not even as raw resources.

The following is a chronological list of the names actually used for spacecraft in the 50 years we've been sending people into space. I've limited myself to *real* spacecraft that actually flew and held people, and space stations. The list counts only *class* names ("Soyuz, Apollo," etc) and actual *real* names ("Freedom 7, Columbia") that were used, not callsigns, and nothing for vehicles that didn't carry people. I've included space stations. I don't feel the need to do "Vostok 5, Vostok 6, Vostok 7," and so on, so "Vostok" is all you get in those situations.

I once, quite inadvertently, got a reader removed from use at my child’s school. It seemed to have been written by the same “lunched out” hippies that in the nineteen-seventies, who decided that because they were against the Vietnam War, and it’s killing on an industrial scale, they were against any other form of technology backed by the government, including space exploration.

My mom worked for NASA in its glory days well over a generation ago. It was an heroic agency in a tumultuous time, one of the few things all Americans could get behind and feel proud of. In the 80s/90s, it just became another bloated bureaucratic bore. Over the last decade, the agency tried fitfully to make itself relevant again, and believe you me, that was in dire need.