CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- If it were up to kids, NASA would be blasting off Thursday to build the Dudeship. Or the Milky Way Bar Stop. Or the Totally Rad Space Place.
With hours remaining before the first space-station construction flight, the international space station still lacks an official name.For lack of anything better, NASA calls it the international space station or, worse, ISS, pronounced letter by letter by NASA: I-S-S. That's about as glamorous as a white, short-sleeve shirt and a pocket protector.
It's not for lack of suggestions.
More than 2,000 youngsters took part recently in an Internet name-the-space-station sweepstakes, and the most popular suggestions, reflecting the influence of TV and the movies, were Enterprise and Apollo.
Other choices, all of which were forwarded to NASA: Dudeship. Way Out, Man. Totally Rad Space Place. Milky Way Bar Stop. MonkeyStar. Vegas. A Giant Space Thingy. Better Than Mir.
NASA officials, who insist they like the ISS name, shrug off suggestions. "I don't do names," station program manager Randy Brinkley sighed, weary of the oft-asked question.
Nevertheless, he christened a laboratory that will become part of the space station in 2000. The name: Destiny. In fact, many of the components of the international space station have names.
Zarya, a Russian power and propulsion tug, was launched two weeks ago from Kazakstan. (Zarya is Russian for Sunrise.) Unity, a passageway, is aboard space shuttle Endeavour, due to blast off before dawn Thursday. Columbus, a European Space Agency laboratory, is scheduled to fly around 2003.
Plus there are Leonardo, Raffaello and Donatello, the Italian Space Agency cargo carriers that will go up and down aboard the space shuttles.
"We've decided to name our dog's legs and all their body parts. So maybe that will be an incentive to come up with a name," Brinkley said. In the meantime, "we just have to call our dog 'dog."'
It's not as though NASA and its 15 international participants have never discussed names. For a while in the early 1990s, the space station was known as Alpha and before that, in another incarnation, Freedom.
Alpha mysteriously disappeared from NASA's radar screen right around the time the Russians climbed aboard in 1993, although the name still is used around Kennedy Space Center.
The Russians supposedly didn't like the name because it implied a beginning or a first, and they had launched the world's first space station, Salyut 1, way back in 1971. Mir, which means Peace, was launched in 1986.
If it were up to the Japanese Space Agency's Hideo Takamatsu, the station would be named after a flower or a TV cartoon so the public would be more in tune with the project. "We need nickname," he stressed.
In Russia, where a TV network is holding a name-the-station contest, the suggestions are more somber: Starovoitova, in memory of the liberal lawmaker gunned down two weeks ago in Russia; Gagarin, in memory of the first man in space; Babylon; even Armageddon.
The European Space Agency's Frank Longhurst urges caution when it comes to anniversary tie-ins. When his agency chose Columbus as the name for its laboratory module, it was supposed to be put into orbit in 1992 -- the 500th anniversary of you-know-who's discovery of America.
Now Longhurst is hoping to get the laboratory into orbit in time for the 500th anniversary of Columbus' death.
That gives them until 2006.