Astronaut Names
Spaceflight names can honor a particular astronaut or cosmonaut. This collection identifies that person for each choice, while the U.S. figures describe the personal name independently of the spaceflight connection.
| Save name | Name & connection | History 1926–2025, yearly counts; individually scaled | Babies 2025 · rank | 5-year rank movement | Peak year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
John Glenn, the first American to orbit Earth. | 8,027#23 | Up 4 rank positions in five years | 1947 | ||
Michael Collins, the Apollo 11 command-module pilot. | 8,094#21 | Down 9 rank positions in five years | 1957 | ||
Scott Carpenter, one of the Mercury Seven astronauts. | 561#534 | Up 30 rank positions in five years | 1971 | ||
Walter Schirra, one of the Mercury Seven astronauts. | 1,381#252 | Up 20 rank positions in five years | 1918 | ||
Kathryn Sullivan, the first American woman to perform a spacewalk. | 381#729 | Down 204 rank positions in five years | 1952 | ||
Judith Resnik, the Space Shuttle astronaut. | 344#790 | Up 120 rank positions in five years | 1943 | ||
Alan Shepard, the first American in space. | 1,915#191 | Up 3 rank positions in five years | 1955 | ||
Victor Glover, the NASA astronaut. | 1,664#211 | Down 11 rank positions in five years | 1990 | ||
Shannon Lucid, the NASA astronaut who lived aboard Mir. | 75#2,405 | Down 449 rank positions in five years | 1970 | ||
Edwin Aldrin, better known as Buzz Aldrin. | 798#398 | Down 54 rank positions in five years | 1922 | ||
Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. | 201#1,158 | Up 11 rank positions in five years | 1947 | ||
Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a Space Shuttle mission. | 437#654 | Up 47 rank positions in five years | 1947 | ||
Gordon Cooper, one of the Mercury Seven astronauts. | 209#1,052 | Down 87 rank positions in five years | 1952 | ||
Franklin Chang-Diaz, the astronaut and engineer. | 909#359 | Up 55 rank positions in five years | 1933 | ||
Mae Jemison, the first African American woman in space. | 594#501 | Up 75 rank positions in five years | 1918 | ||
Neil Armstrong, the Apollo 11 commander. | 288#851 | Down 100 rank positions in five years | 1954 | ||
Virgil Grissom, one of the Mercury Seven astronauts. | 129#1,417 | Up 370 rank positions in five years | 1921 | ||
Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. | 5,354#35 | Up 38 rank positions in five years | 2025 | ||
Leland Melvin, the Space Shuttle astronaut. | 612#494 | Down 24 rank positions in five years | 2007 | ||
The familiar name of astronaut Virgil Grissom. | 145#1,331 | Down 155 rank positions in five years | 1921 | ||
Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space. | 88#1,825 | Up 243 rank positions in five years | 2022 | ||
Alexei Leonov, the first person to perform a spacewalk. | 36#3,244 | Down 358 rank positions in five years | 2021 | ||
Sergei Krikalev, the cosmonaut. | 5#13,573 | Up 137 rank positions in five years | 1998 | ||
The familiar name of Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin. | 7#9,863 | Up 2,466 rank positions in five years | 1951 |
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Sources & methodology
Meaning summaries use Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 4.0) and referenced name histories. Each name’s detail page includes its sources.
Membership on this list is editorial — we chose names that genuinely fit the theme. Every number is from official birth data: "—" means the name had fewer than 5 recorded uses in 2025, which makes it a genuinely rare pick today, not an invalid one. The dot marks whether the stats shown are for the girls' or boys' use of the name.