Colbert Wins Space Station Name Contest

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."

Comments

Colbert trumps Scientology; everyone wins.

[Nakor BlueRider]

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.

Re:Colbert trumps Scientology; everyone wins.

[samkass]

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.

Re:Colbert trumps Scientology; everyone wins.

[FleaPlus]

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

Re:Honorable Way Out for NASA

[MiKM]

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.