On This Day in 2005: My Life Got Sidetracked by Pluto...

NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute

So today marks 20 years since I found out online that I could've placed my name on a compact disc that flew on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft to Pluto and beyond.

Unfortunately, I missed the deadline by two weeks (the last day to submit was September 12, 2005, I believe)...which obviously led to immense disappointment that caused me to compensate for this missed opportunity by being on the lookout for the next online "Send Your Name into Space" campaign by NASA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) or a commercial entity over the next two decades.

It was in the years after New Horizons turned me back into a full-fledged space geek that I got to put my moniker or some other type of mark on such spacecraft as Dawn, the Phoenix Mars lander, JAXA's Kaguya lunar orbiter, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Kepler space telescope, JAXA's Akatsuki Venus orbiter, JAXA's IKAROS solar sail, The Planetary Society's LightSail 2, JAXA's Hayabusa2 asteroid orbiter, OSIRIS-REx, the Curiosity Mars rover, the Perseverance Mars rover, the InSight Mars lander, the MAVEN Mars orbiter, the Parker Solar Probe, JAXA and the European Space Agency's Mercury-bound BepiColombo probe, the Jupiter-bound Europa Clipper, Intuitive Machine's Odysseus lunar lander, Lunar Outpost's MAPP Moon rover, Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost lunar lander and such space shuttle missions as STS-133, STS-134 and STS-135 respectively. Also, my name flew on Orion's Exploration Flight Test-1 mission in 2014, and Artemis 1 in 2022!

But yea, I can literally have my name on a hundred spacecraft scattered around our Solar System, and they still won't make up for the fact that I could've had a virtual presence on a future interstellar probe like New Horizons. Don't get me wrong though— I'm so grateful that NASA and Co. gave the general public the opportunity to be a part of all those exciting missions listed above. Another New Horizons-type spacecraft, Trident, was so close to becoming a reality in 2021...but it ultimately lost out to two Venus missions, VERITAS and DAVINCI.

An interstellar probe that's literally called the Interstellar Probe was in contention in last year's 2024 Heliophysics Decadal Survey, but the National Academy of Sciences ultimately overlooked this daring project for two missions that are nowhere near as inspiring as what the Interstellar Probe would've been.

So yea— The wait continues for another potential interstellar explorer to be greenlit for development...preferably by NASA. Until then, you can fly your name to the Moon via NASA's Artemis 2 mission! This crewed flight to the Moon (the first since Apollo 17 in 1972) is set to launch no later than April of next year. That is all.


NASA / Johns Hopkins APL / Southwest Research Institute / Serge Brunier / Marc Postman / Dan Durda