Send Your Name to Mars (why not?)

I know it’s silly, I’m not a fool, but that doesn’t stop the little kid in me from getting excited over this. There are few things I can commend NASA for these days, and this is one of them. It brings back memories of visiting a national lab, or watching Nova on PBS. It’s the sort of thing NASA was meant to do, to inspire and put smiles on the faces of children while taking Mankind to the stars. It makes NASA fun again.

Enter your name here to ship it to Mars

Every so often, NASA does something like this. It hardly ever reaches the media and not many people ever take part in it, with the sole recent exception being the Colbert row over naming a chunk of the ISS in his honor. The lack of public support for these things is regrettable but expected. NASA just doesn’t “do it” for us anymore. They’ve lost their glamour, and little acts like this can be social life-support for the aging administration.

Now for the pragmatic side of it: How often do you get to throw your name into a chip getting shot to Mars? With the pitiful rate that our exploration of Space is progressing, it’s not looking likely that many of my childhood space-fantasies will come true any time soon.

At least this way, when I’m 50 or 60 years old, I’ll get to see reports of an old, abandoned Mars rover being recovered along with the names of some X thousand nerds people who sent them along for the ride. That’s fun for me, and honestly I don’t know why. It’s just the part of me that loves to watch bad sci-fi movies from my childhood, and ignore how wrong they tended to be about our future.

The Mars Rover set to carry our names is slated to depart sometime in 2011.