Possibly the best known these days is the Space Shuttle Enterprise, named after the starship Enterprise from Star Trek.
The best known before that was probably the nuclear-powered submarine Nautilus (SSN-571), which was the first to sail under the North Pole, in imitation of Jules Verne’s fictional Nautilus from *20,000 Leagues Under the Sea * and The Mysterious Island that sailed under the SOUTH Pole (Verne evidently postulating that there wouldn’t be a continent under the ice blocking all access.) The Disney film had come out five years earlier, and suggested that Nemo’s sub was nuclear-powered, too (not in Verne, of course), but I suspect that the Navy would’ve adopted that name anyway. (its construction was authorized in 1951, before the Disney film came out.) *
What I hadn’t realized was that the nuclear sub wasn’t the first submarine to attempt a transpolar journey. A US Navy submarine with the unromantic name OSS- 12 (later SS-73) was rechristened Nautilus in 1931 after it had been removed from the Navy rolls and used for a civilian attempt to reach the pole. Their diving planes had been damaged, but they still managed to get to 82 degrees north (further than any vessel had gone) before having to turn around and come back. It was diesel powered above water, and battery powered underwater.
The only other case I can think of, sort of, is the MiG-31 When Craig Thomas wrote Firefox in 1977 he designated it a Mig-31. What would become the real Mig-31 had flown first in 1975, but wouldn’t be introduced until 1981 (a year before the movie Firefox came out). The NATO namers missed out on an opportunity for reality to follow fiction, giving the new fighter the name Foxhound.
*“Nautilus” is the ideal name for a submarine, as Robert Fulton and Jules Verne must have realized hen they built their respectively real and fictional submarines. The cephalopod Nautilus, besides having its nifty logarithmic-spiral shell, varies its buoyancy by adding or removing water from the otherwise air-filled spaces in its shell, just as a submarine varies its buoyancy by filling and emptying ballast tanks distributed around its frame.
While the Shuttle was indeed named for the Star Ship Enterprise (according to Wikipedia at least) theEnterprise has a long history in the U.S. Navy, going back to 1775, well before Star Trek.
Well, I was going to say Nautilus, but that was one of the ones Cal opened the thread with.
The only other I can come up with is perhaps Poseidon? Instead of a cruise ship turned over by a rogue wave, it was a submarine hit by a chinese merchant ship I think. Or I could be wrong, can’t find a link to the story I’m thinking of.
Elon Musk named the two autonomous barges the first stage of SpaceX rockets land upon Just Read The Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You after ships in Iain M. Banks’ book The Player of Games.
It was. There was an organized letter writing campaign. The fact that the shuttle Enterprise never got into space is kind of ironic.
The the starship Enterprise was definitely inspired by the aircraft carrier Enterprise.
The submarine, launched in 1929, was certainly not named after the fictional cruise ship in The Poseiden Adventure (1972). Instead, both are named after the Greek God of the sea.
The thread isn’t about real and fictional ships with the same name, but real ships named after fictional ones.
It was cool and I’m sure not entirely coincidental that the first nuclear-powered submarine in the US Navy was named the USS Nautilus (and a small model of the movie submarine hung in the visitor’s center for the Navy sub, which is now a museum ship, the last time I was there), but there had been other ships of that name to serve in the Navy before, as recently as WWII: USS Nautilus - Wikipedia
Of course there have. But it’s not evident that they were named after Verne’s ship – they could have been named after Fulton’s, or (like Fulton’s) after the animal itself.
Considering their under-the-pole missions (and the connection with the Disney film’s nuclear power), it’d be very surprising to me if the two Nautilus submarines I pointed out weren’t named after Captain Nemo’s ship.
Again, there are a lot of examples of ships named ‘Discovery’ - including, I believe, James Cook’s ship - but it wasn’t that long after 2001: A Space Odyssey.
I was a kid, and a big Star Trek fan (and space travel geek) back then, and I remember the letter-writing campaign. It was originally supposed to be named the Constitution, and was renamed by President Ford after the fan support for Enterprise became evident.
