Rangers

A big part of my childhood was The Lone Ranger although I preferred the fight scenes in The Range Rider. The Lone Ranger had a neat origin story. A group of Texas Rangers was ambushed, shot and left for dead but one survived and became the anonymous "Lone Ranger" to avenge the others. He could have been any of them.

Although I liked Westerns, I preferred sf and therefore noticed when the word "Rangers" recurred among "spacemen." Isaac Asimov wrote David Starr, Space Ranger, Andre Norton wrote Star Rangers and Rangers also appear in comics (also here).

Not having read every "Rangers" story, I must not generalize too much. However, I am fairly confident that Poul Anderson's Rangers of the Commonalty are among the best of the science fictional "Rangers." They deserve their own series including an installment about an expedition to Old Earth but, unfortunately, "Starfog" remained one of the several proto-series in Poul Anderson's Technic History.