Space Station Name Generator

Real space stations have been named for ideals (Freedom, Mir meaning peace, Tiangong meaning heavenly palace), for their purpose (Skylab, Salyut meaning salute) or for their location (Lunar Gateway). Fiction follows the same logic and adds a few of its own. Deep Space Nine is a bureaucratic designation the crew never bothered to change. Babylon 5 is a diplomatic mission statement. Tycho Station and Ceres Station in The Expanse simply take the name of the rock they are built on or near, which is how most working stations would really be named.

The kind of station shapes the name. Military bastions borrow fortress vocabulary: Bastion, Redoubt, Rampart, Fort Vigilance. Free ports on the fringe echo pirate history: Tortuga, Freeport, Port Royal. Habitat rings and cylinders reference the engineers who designed them, so O'Neill, Bernal and Stanford Torus are all real proposals. Research stations honor astronomers and astronauts, and settlers name their homes with hopeful words like Haven, Providence and Sanctuary. Old, lived-in stations often lose their formal name entirely and become the Wheel, the Spindle or the Hub.

The list above spans every one of those registers, from crisp designations to worn nicknames, so you can name a Lagrange-point port for a hard sci-fi novel or a smuggler's den for a tabletop campaign.