The Legend of Laelaps

Liza Fust, Director of Operations

3 minute read

The naming of a thing - therein lies a new legend to be told, illustrated best, by the telling of the old. It was with great consideration and discussion back in 2021 that a name needed to be chosen for KMI’s spacecraft. For a long time it was just Mark 1, or the MK1. Of course, it needed to be more than that. A name has power, as you will learn from reading any fairytale (life tip, do not tell your true name to a fairy, it will give them power over you). A name is an indicator as to what something is, it’s perhaps why we take our given names and change them to nicknames, to be more reflective of the people we become with age. Therefore, MK1 needed a name representing where it was coming from and where it was going, and it needed to indicate its place in the story of the space frontier. The mission was thus: rendezvous, retrieve, and relocate space assets in order to safeguard humankind’s way of life on Earth and protect all the possibilities of our future in space.

If not already obvious, the founders and team at KMI all consider themselves to be nerds. In contemplating this important titling of the first KMI spacecraft, it was decided that sticking with a naming convention based on Greek myths, much like NASA’s Apollo and Mercury missions, was a strong potential path forward. However, there is no shortage of material to work with when considering Greek mythology. Suggestions were bandied back and forth and friends and family were pulled in as focus groups considering the name’s meaning, sound, spelling and pronunciation, ease of use and recognition, and its background. Eventually, a conclusion was reached.

The spacecraft was named Laelaps.

(Here you may pause and think back to the sentence before when we talked about ease of spelling and pronunciation. Well, some concessions were made.)

Laelaps. Greek myth, as I mentioned before. But, what is the legend of Laelaps? And whatever could it have to do with a spacecraft catching objects in our orbits? Now here I ask you to humor me, as an English major who was forced to memorize the opening lines of The Iliad, as I take liberties with that opening passage here to tell the story of the mythical hound, Laelaps.

The Legend of Laelaps
Sing, celestials, the ploys of Greek gods and goddesses
and their crafts, which designed the hound named Laelaps,
A canine to catch whatever it was set to chase
Made present to Procris, wife of Cephalus, the hunter
Who then set Laelaps to chase Teumessian, the uncatchable fox
Pursuing and evading, the two continued, no longer in hunting but in nature
Zeus, seeing in his craft this new spun paradox took pity
In stone he set them, Laelaps and Teumessian, and cast them into the heavens
There they continue to run across the sky in endless game
Canis Major and Canis Minor, the one who always catches and the one never caught

When you find the constellation Orion in the night sky, a hunter in his own right, you will see his pack not far from where he is posed - Canis Major and Canis Minor still and always stuck in chase.

So Laelaps is named after that mythic hound who caught everything he chased, as we intend to do with every object we target. We are not so proud as to disregard the second half of that story, that there are some objects, like the Teumessian fox, that will persist in evading capture. Yet KMI, and our Laelaps, will continue to chase in endless pursuit of Keeping Space Clear For All.

Bonus content:

Okay, okay… another reason we named it Laelaps is because we’re all dog lovers and suckers for cute puppies and kitties. In that vein, we started what I think is our best marketing campaign yet, features of KMI team pets demonstrating orbital captures. Here are some examples:

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