Digital News Report- Stephen Colbert won the recent naming contest held by NASA in a landslide. The contest was for Node 3, which will be instlled International Space Station, and Colbert won 230,539 of the more than 1.1 million submissions, according to NASA spokesman John Yembrick. NASA’s suggestion, “Serenity,” came in second, with about 190,000 votes.
Ultimately NASA could choose whatever they want to for the Node. The contest rules say NASA reserves the right to “select a name in accordance with the best interests of the agency. … Such name may not necessarily be one which is on the list of voted-on candidate names.” However, Yembrick said that due to the votes Colbert will be “a little higher” on NASA’s list.
However, despite the node not necessarily being named after him, the idea has been floated to name the toilet contained in the node after Colbert. “As for the toilet rumor, we don’t want to flush away any goodwill by announcing something before we are ready,” Yembrick said.
Stephen Colbert has many other things named after him, some of which is the result of the Colbert Nation’s online voting power. He nearly had a bridge in Hungary named after him when he received more votes than the countries entire population. The Hungarian government decided to not name the bridge after him as he did not speak Hungarian and was still alive.
Colbert also has an eagle, a seal, a spider, a junior hockey league mascot, a Virgin Airlines plane and a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavor named after him. He also tried to get on the presidential primary ballot in his home state of South Carolina, but was ultimately rejected by both Republicans and Democrats.