The Spider and the Gumdrop

In the pioneering days of manned space flight, U.S. astronauts began affectionately bestowing names such as "Molly Brown" on their spacecraft. But NASA officials soon decided that nick names were undignified for craft involved in a historic national effort. Word went out to put an end to name-call ing. Even official labels had to be made more solemn. On the theory that Lunar Excursion Module (LEM) was too frivolous a name for the moon-landing craft, NASA gravely renamed it Lunar Mod ule, thus reducing the friendly LEM to the unpronounceable LM.

Now NASA's name ban is apparently being subverted. Without the knowledge of NASA headquarters in Washington, astronauts and technicians training for the forthcoming Apollo 9 mission (Feb. 28) began substituting descriptive nicknames for the unwieldy jargon prescribed for their spacecraft. The command and service modules--the joined conical and cylindrical-shaped units that constitute the Apollo spacecraft--were collectively dubbed Gumdrop. The ungainly, four-legged lunar module was appropriately renamed Spider. The nicknames have been used so consistently during more than a month of simulator practice that NASA may well be forced to avoid the confusion and inconvenience of a last-minute name change. Then Spider and Gumdrop will perform their missions in space.

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