The USS …Holy Shit Zero-G Sex Is Awesome!!!
USS Gagarin.
(We need and deserve that bitter taste of steel in our mouths to properly motivate the program.)
HAL
iShip
With sister ships Niña and Pinta.
Ah, you’re pushing for the USS MacGyver.
Ouch.
You all get one guess how I voted 
Capt
Hitchhiker’s Guide.
Carrying the useless third of the Gulgafrinchan population and designed to crash on Earth.
I think I can still follow the rules of the assumption and say that the announcement will be that it’s a multi-national effort.
So my problem is with the USS parts of the names.
It’ll be the ISAS Cosmos, where ISAS is International Space Agency Starship or something like that.
USS Randmcnally
USS Lewis and Clark
Except ISAS happens to be the old name for one of the Japanese space agencies. (It’s actually still called ISAS, though now it’s part of JAXA.)
Anyway, USS is only used for US Navy ships. There is no similar prefix used on any spaceship. Challenger was just Challenger.
I’d also point out that the international space station doesn’t really have a name, it’s just called the International Space Station. So I suspect a multinational interstellar spaceship will just be called International Interstellar Spaceship 1, or International Starship 1.
p.s. If it’s a predominantly American mission, my vote is for the Von Braun.
Earth Ship Silent Running.
What’s wrong with United Space Ship? Or, if it’s a purely American project, United States Spaceship?
Some more possibilities that I like: Goddard, Godspeed, Victoria (the only one of Magellan’s five ships to complete the voyage), Nostradamus, Sagan, Von Däniken.
Because…Von Braun was American?
Frank Malina, Jack Parsons, Bill Pickering, and many others at GALCIT/JPL, Rocketdyne, Aeorjet, and other American engineers and scientists, contributed as much or more to American rocketry than Von Braun. (Goddard, of course developed many innovations prior to the Army/NASA programs, but because he did not share or patent most of these innovations they contributed little to American programs before the Peenemünde Army Research Center group was brought over.
But if I had to pick an innovator in American rocket propulsion I’d advance Phil Bono or Bob Truax; not so much for what they accomplished, but the foresight of the concepts they proposed and championed.
Stranger
USS Truax sounds cool. USS Bono … doesn’t. :rolleyes:
How about the USS Heinlein?
Who is the guy who came up with the equation for the number of populated planets?