“All right, I give up, who’s James Caird?” “He was a prosperous textile manufacturer in 1870s Scotland.” “Okay . . . I’m as big a fan of nineteenth-century textile manufacturers as the next guy, but why are we naming our return spacecraft after one?” “Mr. Caird had another small vessel named after him—it was a lifeboat. Ernest Shackleton piloted that lifeboat across 800 miles of Antarctic sea, amid terrible storms, to find a tiny dot of land: South Georgia Island. The journey of the James Caird was considered one of the greatest feats of small-boat navigation in all human history.”
