Teh One Who Knocks
10-09-2014, 11:01 AM
By James Plafke - Geek.com
http://i.imgur.com/b7DiiOY.jpg
Late at night while plumbing the depths of Wikipedia and reading about the relative size of faraway planets and stars, one thing that will inevitably bug you is that you may not be alive to see the day when man steps foot on an alien planet. Mars appears to be your best chance, but — despite progress toward that goal — it may not happen for a long time. So, to soothe your pain about not living long enough to see humans expand throughout the stars, NASA will, at least, get your name on the Red Planet.
From now until October 31, you can enter your name, country, postal code, and email address, and NASA will place your name onto a microchip aboard the Orion spacecraft. In order to test its systems, the spacecraft will launch on December 4 of this year, and orbit Earth twice before coming home and landing in the Pacific Ocean. Your name, however, will be placed on future NASA missions, both exploratory and eventually to Mars.
The submission form (http://mars.nasa.gov/participate/send-your-name/orion-first-flight/) even generates your own embeddable boarding pass:
http://i.imgur.com/AU0kjX7.png
If you want your own boarding pass for Orion’s test flight — which you can look up after it has been generated — you’ll have to submit your info before that October 31 deadline. However, you can still submit your info past the deadline for future flights.
Participants will receive frequent flyer points, presumably for how many missions on which their names have been included, but it’s not yet clear if those points do anything other than let you brag.
If you want to see which parts of the country are participating in the program, you can check out a participation map, which includes the precise number of submissions per state. At the time of writing, California, Texas, and Florida are leading the way by a large margin.
So, while you’ll probably never make it to Mars, at least the alien race hidden below the planet’s dusty surface will find your name on a microchip sometime in the future.
http://i.imgur.com/b7DiiOY.jpg
Late at night while plumbing the depths of Wikipedia and reading about the relative size of faraway planets and stars, one thing that will inevitably bug you is that you may not be alive to see the day when man steps foot on an alien planet. Mars appears to be your best chance, but — despite progress toward that goal — it may not happen for a long time. So, to soothe your pain about not living long enough to see humans expand throughout the stars, NASA will, at least, get your name on the Red Planet.
From now until October 31, you can enter your name, country, postal code, and email address, and NASA will place your name onto a microchip aboard the Orion spacecraft. In order to test its systems, the spacecraft will launch on December 4 of this year, and orbit Earth twice before coming home and landing in the Pacific Ocean. Your name, however, will be placed on future NASA missions, both exploratory and eventually to Mars.
The submission form (http://mars.nasa.gov/participate/send-your-name/orion-first-flight/) even generates your own embeddable boarding pass:
http://i.imgur.com/AU0kjX7.png
If you want your own boarding pass for Orion’s test flight — which you can look up after it has been generated — you’ll have to submit your info before that October 31 deadline. However, you can still submit your info past the deadline for future flights.
Participants will receive frequent flyer points, presumably for how many missions on which their names have been included, but it’s not yet clear if those points do anything other than let you brag.
If you want to see which parts of the country are participating in the program, you can check out a participation map, which includes the precise number of submissions per state. At the time of writing, California, Texas, and Florida are leading the way by a large margin.
So, while you’ll probably never make it to Mars, at least the alien race hidden below the planet’s dusty surface will find your name on a microchip sometime in the future.