NASA will
announce on Tuesday the name it has chosen for a new space station module with
help from comedian Stephen Colbert, who has campaigned for weeks to have it
named for him.
The U.S.
space agency said today that it will reveal the
official name of Node 3 — a new room for the International Space Station — on
Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report."
"The
program is having us on knowing that we have chosen a name, but they do not
know the name of the node," NASA spokesperson John Yembrick told SPACE.com
from the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C. "To be honest, only a
handful of people know at this point."
The name
was chosen a few days ago and will be revealed by NASA astronaut Sunita
Williams, who lived
aboard the space station for nearly seven months between 2006 and 2007,
Yembrick said.
"I
certainly hope NASA does the right thing," said Colbert. "Just
kidding, I hope they name it after me."
Naming
Node 3
Node 3 is a
cylindrical room slated to be delivered to the space station in February 2010
aboard a NASA space shuttle. It will serve as the hub for much of the space
station's life support systems and include eight equipment racks, each the size
of a kitchen refrigerator. The node will also house one of the space station's
bathrooms and an observation portal that will serve as its robotic arm
workstation.
Colbert
has been pressing NASA to name Node 3 after him after winning the space
station's recent online poll to choose its new moniker.
He urged fans
to vote for his name as a write-in candidate and ended up with more
than 230,000 votes, outdistancing the top NASA-chosen candidate "Serenity"
by 40,000 ballots. Even members of Congress rallied to his cause. The online
poll closed on March 20.
Yembrick
said that such an outpouring of support from Colbert's fans made unveiling Node
3's name on the comedian's cable television show a natural choice.
"His
audience took an interest ...and we want to honor them for caring," Yembrick
said. The agency initially planned to unveil the name on April 28, when the
module was due to arrive at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But the
delivery has been delayed to May, so NASA opted to move the announcement up,
agency officials said.
NASA's
rules for the poll clearly state that the voting results would not be binding,
but some sources have suggested that the outpouring of support by Colbert's
fans may prompt the agency to name
Node 3's space toilet in honor of the comedian.
"The node naming poll was organic and took on a life of
its own," said NASA's space operations chief William Gerstenmaier, who was
grilled by Colbert on Node 3's name when the official appeared on the show last
month. "We received more than a million entries, in large part because
social media Web sites and television programs, such as 'The Colbert Report,'
took an interest. This spread overall awareness of the International Space
Station."
NASA will unveil the new name for Node 3 on the April 14
episode of the "The Colbert Report," which will air on Comedy Central at 11:30
p.m. EDT. Check local listings.
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