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Colbert Wins Space Station Name Contest

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the unintended-consequences dept.

As we speculated a couple of weeks back, it has come to pass. Reader mknewman writes to tell us that comedian Stephen Colbert has won the vote to have his name immortalized (or at least until it crashes) as the moniker on NASA's newest addition to the International Space Station. We can but wonder what NASA will do now. "NASA's mistake was allowing write-ins. Colbert urged viewers of his Comedy Central show, 'The Colbert Report' to write in his name. And they complied, with 230,539 votes. That clobbered Serenity, one of the NASA choices, by more than 40,000 votes. Nearly 1.2 million votes were cast by the time the contest ended Friday."

10 of 471 comments (clear)

  1. Colbert trumps Scientology; everyone wins. by Nakor+BlueRider · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's not mentioned in the article, but what brought this all up in the first place was the fact that "Xenu" was winning the write-in vote before he asked viewers on his show to write in his own name instead. Xenu is the galactic overlord from Scientology myth. Colbert asked his viewers to write in his own name, and the following day he had already passed Xenu on the write-ins. The show that evening, he declared himself the new galactic overlord.

    Incidentally, NASA reserved the write to call it whatever they want; they don't have to go with the vote.

    1. Re:Colbert trumps Scientology; everyone wins. by schon · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's too bad..

      My information may be out of date, but at one time Scientologists were told they needed to have scientology-approved censorware on their computers, and one of the things that the banned words was "xenu" (apparently to protect the scientologists from encountering a website that would kill them.)

      It would have been hilarious if ever website that contained a reference to the space station would have been blocked.

    2. Re:Colbert trumps Scientology; everyone wins. by samkass · · Score: 5, Informative

      Incidentally, NASA reserved the write to call it whatever they want; they don't have to go with the vote.

      I suspect it's as likely to be named "Colbert" as Hank, the Angry, Drunken Dwarf is to become People's Most Beautiful Person.

      --
      E pluribus unum
    3. Re:Colbert trumps Scientology; everyone wins. by FleaPlus · · Score: 5, Informative

      As someone else pointed out in a previous thread on this subject, serious organizations, especially ones with government connections, don't like to name things after people who are still alive.

      You see, if you name it after a person who has lived out their life, you can evaluate their entire life and make sure that they haven't done anything that you wouldn't want to be associated with. However, someone who is still alive might very well do something in the future (kill someone in a drunk driving accident, get caught with child pornography, shoot their wife, etc) that no one wants to be associated with.

      Of course, not everybody follows that advice:

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Stevens_Anchorage_International_Airport

    4. Re:Colbert trumps Scientology; everyone wins. by justgosh · · Score: 4, Informative

      Here is the domain and word list for the censorware. http://www.xenu.net/archive/events/censorship/wordlist.html

  2. Slight Exageration by Yankumi · · Score: 3, Informative

    I hardly think that a 3.3% margin of defeat is worthy of the adjective "clobbering".

  3. Not so fast... by memorycardfull · · Score: 3, Informative

    From the article: "NASA reserves the right to choose an appropriate name."

  4. Coal bear, except for the WGA strike by tepples · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is awful. I've heard him pronounce his *own* name different ways on his show.

    As I understand it, The Colbert Report is "the coal bear rapport" most of the time, but it was temporarily changed to "the coal bert report" during the first quarter of 2008 to signify the more improvisational format that the striking Writers Guild of America forced on Colbert. Likewise, The Daily Show got replaced with A Daily Show .

  5. Re:News from 2015 by Narishma · · Score: 3, Informative

    You clearly don't watch his show. He often talks about Nasa and space stuff. He even did a couple of interviews with astronauts aboard the ISS.

    --
    Mada mada dane.
  6. Re:Honorable Way Out for NASA by MiKM · · Score: 5, Informative

    I liked Serenity not because of the show, but because it fits well with the other two modules Unity and Harmony. If this were the first to be named, I'd definitely advocate honoring a scientists, but as sysadmin knows, having a consistent naming scheme is nice.