Colbert's NASA Dreams Are Crushed... Hilariously
Stephen Colbert
Democracy is dead: NASA has opted not to name a room in the international space station after Stephen Colbert.
Even though Colbert won an online poll by a landslide, NASA instead chose "Tranquility," which came in eighth place in the poll, as the room's new moniker. Space nerds will know that the name is a reference to the Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
But it's not all bad news: 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.
"We don't typically name U.S. space station hardware after living people and this is no exception," Bill Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations, snarked to the AP. He added that Colbert has been invited to Florida to test out a version of the COLBERT.