Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Sorry Mr. Colbert: New Module Named Tranquility



The next and final U.S. module at the International Space Station is being named Tranquility, rather than Colbert, after cable TV comedian Stephen Colbert, who lobbied for the agency to make the node his namesake.

Appearing on The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, NASA astronaut Suni Williams, who spent more than six months aboard the orbiting outpost, broke the news to the comic during his 11:30 p.m. show tonight.

Colbert lobbied his vast audience to submit his surname during a "Name The Node" contest NASA recently held, and his supporters chalked up more than 230,000 votes.

"Serenity" was second with about 190,000 votes, and Colbert said he submitted seven votes for the name "Fart Monkey."

Williams, deputy director of the NASA Astronaut Office at Johnson Space Center in Houston, did not say why NASA selected Tranquility.

But it's well known that the Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the Sea of Tranquility on the moon 40 years ago July 20, marking the first time humans have set foot on another planetary body.

NASA did, however, offer up a consolation prize.

The agency in August plans to launch to the station a treadmill that will be called the Combined Operational Load-Bearing External Resistive Treadmill (or COLBERT).

It will reside inside the Tranquility Module, a pressurized passageway to be launched to the outpost in February. Station astronauts, who work out two hours a day to stay physically fit for their ultimate return to normal gravity, will exercise on the apparatus every day.

"Everyday somebody will have to jump on the COLBERT to work out," Williams said. "So the words that will be passed down on space-to-ground (will be), 'It's time for me to jump on COLBERT."

5 comments:

Charles Boyer said...

I didn't see the program (still working) but I do wonder why NASA bothered having a naming poll at all when it didn't choose the winner or the second place selection. I am fine with the Tranquility name, but I would have been fine with the name Colbert too.

That's because had NASA used the name Colbert it would have had a cheerleader on a widely watched television show mentioning ISS constantly -- and not letting it drop far from people's minds.

NASA's biggest hurdle these days are not the formidable technical challenges that they face in their daily operations or their work on the next generation manned spacecraft, instead, they have a real image problem.

The good work they do is considered "routine" -- as if launching and flying incredibly complex and dangerous equipment is like an airline operating a fleet of 737s. The good science they do and are preparing to do on the ISS is derided by some who do not understand that ISS is still incomplete.

That tells me NASA is not getting its message out adequately. Space has become "educational" for children, as though it cannot inspire adults. NASA has clung far too long to its Apollo glory and even then, it has failed to communicate how much we learned and how much we earned in engineering acumen as a part of that venerated program. It also seems to give short shrift to its current group of astronauts and science with its constant gaze backwards.

Shift forward NASA, inspire for the future and the dollars will come. Constantly replay the Apollo tapes and people will wonder why their tax dollars are going to repititions of history lessons.

Anonymous said...

good stuff

Anonymous said...

I think they should have named the entire module "Colbert." After all, how many people do you think can actually name any of the other modules up there? To the vast majority of people, it's the Space Station. Most probably didn't even know the individual modules had names until Stephen Colbert gave their contest national attention. NASA really needs to hire some good PR people.

- lady_mountaineer

Anonymous said...

Darn! If I had known "fart monkey" was an option, I would have voted for that!

CharlieA said...

I am Relieved!

The idea of an ISS Node being used as some kind of 'vanity plate' really upset me.

I therefore, entered the name "Audacity". Will NASA ever release the full list of (Printable) names?