A note on our naming

You may have noticed a theme if you've looked closely at SceneSat: our logo is Sputnik-1, and a few of the systems running behind the station borrow names from the same era of space history — Zarya, Korolev, Orbita, Cosmodrome, Zond, and a few others you'll never see unless you go digging.

It's an aesthetic choice, not a political one. We have no affiliation with, and no opinion to express through, any government, past or present.

The starting point was the logo: Sputnik-1 is the satellite, the one that kicked off the whole space age, and it draws beautifully as a mark. Once that was our symbol, naming the systems around it after the same era just felt consistent. It didn't hurt that the obvious alternatives were mostly already spoken for — "Enterprise," "Apollo," "Orion," "Discovery" have each been a shuttle, a spacecraft, a Star Trek ship and a dozen unrelated products besides. The early Soviet program gave us names just as evocative — a dawn, a probe, an orbit, a launch site — without decades of branding already stuck to them.

For what it's worth, Zarya — the name behind one of our services — was also the first module of the International Space Station: built in Russia, funded and owned by the United States, launched to build something both countries used together. Not a bad namesake for a station that exists because a scattered community decided to build something together too.

So: no message, no endorsement. Just a satellite we liked the look of, and a theme that followed naturally from it.

// Team SceneSat