A good space station name tells you what the station is for before you dock: Fort Castellano is a military post, Freeport Allspice a trading hub, Manganese Bore a mine. This space station name generator names orbital stations of every kind: military forts and fleet anchorages, research observatories, busy trading freeports, rough mining outposts, glittering luxury resorts and derelict hulks drifting in the dark. Add a short description for an instant story hook in your sci-fi novel, tabletop RPG or game.
Eight good space station names
All eight came from the generator, across its six styles:
- Fort Ivers, whose crew still runs drills for a war that ended decades ago: a military station with a story in one line.
- Picket Echo-Seven: a small outpost named with the phonetic alphabet, the way military callsigns are.
- Hollis Survey Station, where three Nobel winners share one tiny kitchen: a research station with a human touch.
- Listening Post Fulcrum: a quiet name for a station that watches and waits.
- Waystation Mercator, where smugglers and inspectors drink in the same bar: a trading hub named after the mapmaker, with trouble built in.
- Mica Vein, a remote dig with a population of forty and a very good darts team: a mining outpost named after what it digs.
- Château Orrery: a luxury resort that sounds expensive before you see the prices.
- Station Threnody, where something is still tending the greenhouse: a derelict named after a funeral song, for a horror one-shot.
How real and fictional stations are named
Real space stations have mostly been given short, hopeful names:
- Salyut, Russian for "salute", was the name of the Soviet Union's first stations; Salyut 1 launched in 1971.
- Mir, which flew from 1986 to 2001, means both "peace" and "world" in Russian.
- Skylab, America's first station (1973), was named for what it was: a laboratory in the sky.
- The International Space Station kept a plain, descriptive name because it belongs to several countries at once.
- Tiangong, China's station, means "heavenly palace".
Fiction tends to go one of two ways: a code or number, like Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5, or a name that tells you who runs it. The generator does both:
- Military stations are forts, pickets and fleet yards, often with a callsign: Watchpost Yankee Eight, Glaive Station.
- Research stations are arrays and listening posts named after scientists or scientific words: Nyberg-Brightman Array, Station Calculus.
- Trading hubs borrow from spices and old coins: The Paprika Market, Guilder Emporium.
- Mining outposts name the ore and the hole: Bismuth Refinery 52, Gallagher's Motherlode.
- Luxury stations sound like grand hotels: The Aurelian Retreat, Marchmont Casino & Spa.
- Derelict stations are named after the last thing anyone said, or felt: Lusk's Silence, Kessler's Regret.
Choose With a description for a one-line hook to start a scene with.
Using a station in your story
- Give it a nickname. Crews never use the official name: Bismuth Refinery 52 becomes "the Fifty-Two".
- Let the name date it. A station named after a war, a founder or a company tells players how old it is and who built it.
- Use the description as a hook. "Warmer than it should be" is the start of a session.
For the ships that dock there, try the Spaceship Name Generator. For what it orbits, there's the Planet, Moon and Star name generators, and for the people who settle below, the Colony Name Generator.
For more, see all the sci-fi name generators.