A Conservation of Yuris
Earlier this week, I was scanning through Wikipedia’s list of expeditions to the International Space Station for work, trying to figure out how many people were living aboard the station ~2021, when I noticed a funny coincidence at the very start of the page:
That’s a lot of guys named Yuri.
Upon seeing the name “Yuri/Yury” repeated several times through the first few expeditions, I had two initial thoughts:
Wow, that’s a lot of guys named Yuri.
Huh! Lots of -enko names, too. Are those guys actually Ukrainian?
After some additional Wikipedia dumpster diving, I learned that all of the -enko Yuri/Yury cosmonauts shown above were, indeed, born in the Ukrainian SSR before the dissolution of the USSR (the only non -enko name, Yuri Usachov, was born just across the border with Russia in Donetsk, in the Rostov Oblast). Okay, so that was enough to pique my interest, but it also got me wondering: just how many Yuri cosmonauts are there?
I should start off by saying that Yuri is a great astronaut name. Yuri Gagarin was a cosmonaut who became the first human in space when he launched into orbit aboard Vostok 1. It is also an extremely popular name both in Russia and other former Soviet states. Maybe this was just a coincidence - Russia just happened to have a lot of high-achieving Yuris who all became cosmonauts. It happens. After all, 40% of French astronauts have the prefix Jean- in their name.
Image credit: Worldhistoryedu
But it still didn’t answer my question…how many cosmonauts are named Yuri? Was it just those four and Gagarin? I was determined to find the answer, and because I have no chill, I spent an hour before work counting up all the cosmonauts and their first names.
The top 15 given names in the Russian cosmonaut corps.
In total, there are 135 cosmonauts who have flown in space. There are plenty of one-off names like Svetlana and Boris and Ivan, but many repeats. I was startled to find that despite my initial findings, Yuri isn’t even the most common cosmonaut name - there are a whopping 14 cosmonauts with the first name Aleksandr/Alexander, which means that just over 10% of all cosmonauts are named Aleksandr. Yuri is a close second at just under 9%, and the next two names, Vladimir and Sergei, are tied for third at 8.1%.
Okay, you might be thinking: well, John is a pretty popular name here in America. Is Yuri just the Russian equivalent John?
First of all, I hate to be That Guy, but Yuri isn’t literally the Russian equivalent of John. It is actually the Slavic version of George, derived from the Greek name Georgios. But there must be some common name in American culture that is overrepresented in the astronaut corps. Right?
Naturally, I decided to count all of the given names of the American astronauts, from the Mercury 7 all the way up through the most recent class, Group 23, which was selected in 2021. In just over 60 years of spaceflight, there have been 16 astronauts named John, but this represents only 4.3% of all NASA astronauts.
So why are almost 40% of cosmonauts named Yuri, Vladimir, Sergei, and Aleksandr?
I don’t really have the answer. My working theories are that it’s a small sample size, and Russia is relatively homogenous; only 135 cosmonauts have flown in space, and only 5 of them were female, leaving the rest to reflect the most popular male baby names of the USSR.
The US astronaut corps is larger, with 365 astronauts. And for all of our struggles, the US is actually quite culturally diverse. Even if the astronaut corps still doesn’t reflect the general population, there’s a higher chance that its members might reflect names from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Just over 13% of the US astronaut corps has been female, compared to Russia’s 3.7%, which opens up more feminine names.
Still no American Yuri yet - so we still have a ways to go in the space race.