# The name: Guion

**Pronunciation:** GUY-on.

**Namesake:** Guion S. "Guy" Bluford Jr. (Colonel, USAF, retired; former NASA astronaut).

## The choice

Recorded on 2026-11-03 from the project's architect, R. Michael Thomas, who chose the name when the project was renamed from Veritas on 2026-10-25:

- The language is named in honour of Guion Bluford and his achievements.
- The name was also chosen because "Guion" sounds like the name of a subatomic particle, alongside the muon, the gluon and the quark.
- It is pronounced GUY-on. The architect heard it said that way in a video or read it in a transcript. NASA's pages below confirm that he goes by "Guy" but do not spell out the pronunciation, so "GUY-on" is stated here as the project's own pronunciation, not as a NASA record.

The word's Spanish meaning (a screenplay or script) is not the origin and is not used as a motif.

## Who he is

From NASA's records:

- Guion Bluford, "better known as Guy", launched on the space shuttle Challenger's STS-8 mission on August 30, 1983, and "became the first African-American to fly in space". ([NASA, "Celebrating Guy Bluford's Historic First Flight", 2018](https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/celebrating-guy-blufords-historic-first-flight/))
- He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 22, 1942. He received a doctor of philosophy in aerospace engineering, with a minor in laser physics, from the Air Force Institute of Technology in 1978.
- As an Air Force pilot he flew 144 combat missions, 65 of them over North Vietnam, and logged more than 5,200 hours of jet flight time.
- He became a NASA astronaut in August 1979. "A veteran of four space flights", he was a mission specialist on STS-8, STS 61-A, STS-39 and STS-53, and "logged over 688 hours in space".
- He was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 2010.

Source for the last four items: [NASA Biographical Data, Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, May 2019](https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/bluford_guion.pdf).