Stephen Colbert really wants to be among the stars.
(Credit: Comedy Central)If the results of an online poll are any indication, NASA may soon be naming a new wing of the International Space Station, Node 3, after late-night comedian Stephen Colbert.
According to the Associated Press, write-ins for "Colbert" crushed all of NASA's four poll options, pulling in 230,539 votes; the second-place choice, NASA suggestion "Serenity" (a nod to sci-fi hero Joss Whedon) was more than 40,000 votes behind. Writer Dave Barry also threw his hat in the ring, suggesting "Buddy" as the perfect name for Node 3. But he didn't amass nearly enough support.
Colbert has made a habit of encouraging his loyal fans, whom he calls "The Colbert Nation," to game all kinds of online naming polls so that some incarnation of his name will emerge the winner. But he suffered an embarrassing defeat when the government of Hungary refused to name a new bridge after him, despite an extensive naming campaign on his Comedy Central pundit show, "The Colbert Report," to vote for him in the official online bridge-naming poll. (The government's excuse? The bridge could only be named after someone who speaks Hungarian.)
Colbert also couldn't get the right kind of support from either fans or state government authorities to put himself on the South Carolina presidential primary ballot in 2007. But with no poll involved, upstart airline Virgin American named one of its planes "Air Colbert."
As for the new "node" in the International Space Station, NASA spokesman John Yembrick told the AP that the government agency will make its final name choice next month. Don't give up hope, Nation!
(Credit:
Discovery)
NEW YORK--On Tuesday night, the Discovery Channel hosted a few hundred guests at the American Museum of Natural History's Hayden Planetarium for a preview of When We Left Earth: The NASA Missions, filling the audience up with cocktails called "The Liftoff" (a tequila sunrise in a rocket-like champagne glass) and then packing us all into the planetarium's theater to watch some cool retro space visuals.
The miniseries got its start when Discovery embarked upon a project to archive old NASA footage in a high-definition format as a commemoration of the agency's 50th anniversary. It evolved, following in the footsteps of last year's successful Planet Earth, into an ambitious, high-profile HD miniseries. When We Left Earth is very watchable, especially for space junkies who will dig the never-before-seen clips of astronauts. But it's less visually impressive than its terrestrial predecessor. The problem with turning grainy 1960s-era footage into high-definition is that it's still grainy 1960s-era footage.
That said, in an age when space travel only seems to make headlines when Sir Richard Branson is talking about his lofty plans to jet millionaires around among the satellites, it was pretty cool to peek into an era when NASA wasn't always brought up in the same sentence as "budget cuts." The national enthusiasm over the quest to put humans on the moon is something that we could all learn from when it comes to current scientific challenges--alternative energy, I'm looking at you.
When We Left Earth is a six-part series; Tuesday night's screening featured episode two, about the Gemini missions of the mid-1960s. It was an apt pick for the big screen, because Project Gemini was the first U.S. spaceflight initiative to feature space walks, which are always good eye candy. It was also an upbeat chapter to screen, considering Project Gemini went relatively smoothly and disaster-free, minus a (SPOILER ALERT!) moderate nail-biter when Gemini VI initially failed to launch.
It'll premiere on the evening of June 8. "Liftoff" cocktails aren't included, but you can easily make your own with some orange juice, grenadine, and Cuervo.
OK, this makes more sense.
CNET News.com reported earlier on a collaboration between crafts site Etsy and the NASA Ames Research Center on a new contest that encourages members of the Etsy community to design NASA-inspired handmade goods. The announcement was made at the PSFK Conference in New York during a panel discussion featuring NASA's Andrew Hoppin and Etsy founder Robert Kalin.
In an unintended verbal gaffe, Kalin said, "We'll send the two winners into space." The audience, along with this reporter, assumed he meant that the Etsy crafters who won the contest would get to be astronauts--in this world of Microsoft space tourists and Virgin Galactic, it didn't seem all that ridiculous.
Unfortunately for any wannabe astronauts, it'll be the winning artwork, not the artists, who get to go to space. Hoppin said later that he clarified the matter shortly thereafter, but that a malfunctioning microphone (there had been some sound issues earlier in the morning) may have that it wasn't widely heard.
So if you're an avid Etsy artist, you probably still won't fulfill your dreams of going into orbit--but your crocheted pillows might.
This post was updated at 11:51 AM PT in order to correct a misstatement that was made in the announcement. The winning artwork from the Etsy-NASA contest, not the artists, will make a trip into space. Read the correction post here.
NEW YORK--What does a marketplace for handmade crafts have to do with a NASA project in virtual world Second Life?
A lot, apparently, according to a panel at Thursday's PSFK Conference that paired Robert Kalin, founder of the Brooklyn-based handmade goods site Etsy, and Andrew Hoppin, co-founder of NASA Co-Labs at the NASA Ames Research Center. The topic of the panel, which was moderated by futurist consultant Greg Verdino of Crayon, was the collaborative working movement known as "co-working."
"This is no longer a phenomenon that is limited to the one-man shop," Verdino said. "What we're starting to see now is this notion of co-working transcending physical space and blending physical work spaces, digital and virtual."
Hoppin and Kalin announced as part of the panel that Etsy and NASA would actually be doing some co-working on their own. "Etsy and NASA are partnering on a program that we're calling Space Craft," Kalin explained. Space Craft will be a contest in which Etsy members create products inspired by NASA's logo; finalists' work will wind up in the NASA gift shop, and two piece of winning artwork will get to go into space. The audience seemed a bit taken aback, possibly due to the incorrect assumption that Kalin meant the artists would be the ones to go into space. "This is all sort of in the planning phase," Kalin added.
Sounds like more concrete information will be forthcoming.
Aside from the plan to put crafty hipsters in space, the panel mostly touched upon the two speakers' rationales for their support of collaborative working. Hoppin explained that the Ames Research Center, located in Silicon Valley, originally opened a virtual co-working space in Second Life because there was too much governmental red tape to open a physical one. In the Co-Labs work space, there are virtual lectures, 3D replications of the planets, and in-world projects that both NASA employees and outsiders can work on. "People can dress up as penguins," he said. "This is not really where you'd expect, as a NASA bureaucrat, to find NASA."
He added that the space agency is still working on opening a physical work-space in the Valley and is in talks with Yahoo.
Kalin, who says he "doesn't get" Second Life, was asked by Verdino about Etsy's "spirit of collaboration between buyer and seller." Etsy uses chat rooms, wikis, and other various social tools so that it's a bit more interactive than, say, eBay and its feedback ratings.
"There's something magical about the item that you get," Kalin explained. "It comes from this connection that you made online, but (then) you get the physical item."
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