SpaceX Dragon: How The Groundbreaking Capsule Got Its Name
If the SpaceX astronautics company was known for anything besides being owned by Elon Musk, it'd be the fact that the various rockets, capsules, and equipment used in the company's many groundbreaking missions all have exceptionally cool names. Its primary series of rockets bear the moniker of the mighty Falcon, it has engines named after the mythical wizard Merlin, and its revolutionary space-traversing capsules are named after the legendary Dragon. The thing with cool names, though, is that they often don't just come out of nowhere. Even if "Dragon" just sounds like a cool name to give a spaceflight project in general, there had to have been some kind of spark that prompted SpaceX to bestow that name upon its first capsule to dock at the ISS.
As it so happens, there actually is a small story behind the name of the Dragon capsule, a mildly humorous one that may be of interest to fans of classic folk music. The impetus for the name of the Dragon capsule arose as a sort of act of defiance from Elon Musk, and a classic tune that folks young and old have been whistling to themselves as far back as the 1960s.
The capsule was named after the classic song, Puff, the Magic Dragon
In a 2008 interview with Zeitgeist, Elon Musk revealed that the Dragon capsule was originally slated to be called the "Magic Dragon." This was intended to be a reference to the 1962 folk song, "Puff, the Magic Dragon," performed by folk group Peter, Paul and Mary. For those too young to remember, many have hypothesized that "Puff, the Magic Dragon" is a veiled reference to marijuana usage, though both Peter Yarrow and the creator of the original poem that inspired the song, Lenny Lipton, have denied this.
The name arose as a bit of a passive-aggressive swing from Musk against those who believed SpaceX couldn't rise to prominence in its early days.
"Dragon was actually named after Puff, the Magic Dragon because so many people thought I must be smoking weed to do this venture," Musk said.
This story was later corroborated by engineer Dr. Tom Markusic in a 2022 presentation by Texas Engineering. Dr. Markusic previously worked for SpaceX, and recalled an instance of Musk humming "Puff, the Magic Dragon" after a meeting with the United States Congress to discuss the creation of a new capsule.
Dr. Markusic said that Musk chose the name because "it was such a fantasy, it was such a joke that Elon was like, 'Okay, fine. We'll call it Magic Dragon.'"