NASA Walk’s All Over Colbert
Recently NASA held a poll to seek input from the public to help them name a new room on the International Space Station known as Node 3.
‘Serenity’ was the name that won the online poll, chosen after Joss Whedon’s spacecraft from the excellent sci-fi television series Firefly.
In a hilarious twist however, Comedian Stephen Colbert urged viewers of The Colbert Report to submit his name. 230,539 viewers complied, and the result was the name ‘Colbert’ topped the name ‘Serenity’ by more than 40,000 votes once snail mail votes were accounted for.
Many believed NASA would be forced to name the new Space Station room ‘Colbert’, but in the end fans of Joss Whedon’s much loved sci-fi series weren’t the only ones foiled as NASA instead opted to choose the name that came eighth place in the poll. The new room on the International Space Station will now be named ‘Tranquility’ after the Sea of Tranquility where Apollo 11 landed.
Stpehen Colbert didn’t luck out entirely though. On Tuesday’s The Colbert Report, NASA astronaut Sunita Williams announced that Stephen Colbert will get his small piece of immortality after all, as the organization voted to name a treadmill on board the space station after him. The treadmill will hence forth be referred to as the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (COLBERT).
Colbert’s antics may have walked all over the integrity of NASA’s poll, but in the end NASA’s astronauts will get to walk all over him – over and over again. Hopefully some of them are Firefly fans.
April 16th, 2009 at 4:25 am
…The problem is that NASA asked for submissions, and instead of going by the popular vote they threw it away because the Pubic Affairs Office (PAO) didn’t like what the taxpaying public wanted. This will eventually backfire on NASA, because the next time they issue a call for votes for some other module or probe, people are going to ignore it knowing that it’s a waste of their time.
While I’d have preferred the node be named something rational, and the *toilet* be named for an idiot like Colbert, the entire PAO still should be sacked over this debacle…