The British television comedy Red Dwarf prominently features many different spaceships. Three feature regularly, and several have appeared for one or two episodes only but are nonetheless important to Red Dwarf continuity or well-known among the fan community. Dozens of spaceships have been seen only in one episode and no more. A few ships have also been mentioned but not seen.

The eponymous spaceship Red Dwarf is an enormous mining vessel owned by the Jupiter Mining Corporation and commanded by Captain Frank Hollister. It is 6 miles (10 km) long, 4 miles (6.5 km) tall, and 3 miles (5 km) wide. The jagged shape and dull red colour of the vessel has led to the vessel being described as a "giant red trash can". All of Red Dwarf's systems are controlled by the computer Holly.

A small asteroid is embedded in Red Dwarf's underbelly. Upon the reconstruction of Red Dwarf in Series VIII, there were two asteroids. It is never explained if the asteroids are in fact being mined as the ship is underway or are accidental strikes resulting in fusion with the ship's structure.

A red dwarf is a small and relatively cool star on the main sequence, either late K or M spectral type. They have a mass of less than half that of the Sun (down to about 0.075 solar masses, below which stellar objects are brown dwarfs) and a surface temperature of less than 4,000 K. Red dwarfs are by far the most common type of star in the Galaxy, at least in the neighborhood of the Sun. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, is a red dwarf (Type M5, apparent magnitude 11.05), as are twenty of the next thirty nearest. However, due to their low luminosity, individual red dwarfs cannot easily be observed. From Earth, none is visible to the naked eye.

Stellar models indicate that red dwarfs with less than 35% of the Sun's mass are fully convective. Hence the helium produced by the thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen is constantly remixed throughout the star, avoiding a buildup at the core. Red dwarfs therefore develop very slowly, having a constant luminosity and spectral type for some hundreds of billions of years, until their fuel is depleted. Because of the comparatively short age of the universe, no red dwarfs of advanced evolutionary stages exist in the current era.