When Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert won NASA’s online poll to name the International Space Station’s third habitat node, the agency invoked a contest rule allowing it to pick the name regardless of the vote. Though if Firefly fans bet NASA would choose Serenity, the second most popular name – they lost!
Colbert had threatened to become “space’s evil tyrant overlord” if he didn’t get his way. NASA mollified him by dispatching astronaut Sunita “Suni” Williams to announce the chosen name during his Tuesday broadcast. SeattlePI.com reports that NASA reached down to eighth place in the poll and chose “Tranquility”, a name that refers to the Sea of Tranquility, Apollo 11’s lunar landing site.
But NASA did throw Colbert this bone:
On Tuesday’s The Colbert Report, NASA astronaut Sunita Williams announced that 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 in question will heretofore be known as the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill (COLBERT). Williams explained that treadmills are vitally important to astronauts, as they use them to prevent bone-strength loss while in space.
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Of course, even though “Serenity” was one of their own suggestions, fitting in their established theme just fine, they have to show those punk Firefly fans who’s in charge here, and deliberately choose a name other than that chosen by the majority, just for spite.
NASA p.r. department continues to serve NASA’s purposes just as well as it ever has, just as the managers whose decisions lost Columbia still work there, never demoted, never prosecuted for criminal negligence, much less manslaughter, just like their equally culpable counterparts from the Challenger disaster continued on without penalty.