From East High Street to Europa: NASA Wants Your Name

WASHINGTON DC – If you think a trip into space represents the ultimate vacation, a new offer from NASA may be of interest.

No special helmet or suit is required and participants won’t need to leave home … except maybe to buy groceries. Their names, however, will actually travel toward worlds beyond imagination.

The agency in October 2024 plans to send a spacecraft named Europa Clipper on a six-year, 1.8 billion-mile journey to Jupiter. Its equipment will study an ocean beneath the icy surface of Jupiter’s moon, Europa, to determine if it could support life as humans know it.

Packed aboard the unmanned ship will be a poem by U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón, titled “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.” NASA is giving members of the public a chance to sign their names to the poem.

Its “Message In A Bottle” campaign, as it’s called, is free and open now. All names (first and last) must be submitted online no later than Dec. 31 (2023; Sunday) by 11:59 p.m. Be aware: participants also will be asked to provide an e-mail address, their state, and zip code.

The names – tens of millions of them are expected – will be stenciled onto a microchip that also carries the poem. Engineers will safely secure the chip inside Europa Clipper, then send the ship zooming toward the planet that’s fifth-most-distant from the sun. Who knows who, or what, will find it when the spacecraft is due to arrive in 2030?

NASA acknowledges “Message In A Bottle” is a way to generate interest in space and the agency’s programs. It’s worked before. Similar but different earlier campaigns enabled people to send their names to ride along with the unmanned Artemis I flight around Earth’s moon in November 2022, as well as with several spacecraft to Mars.

There will be those who, for reasons of their own, don’t want their names distributed hither and yon. That’s OK; NASA understands. It’s still letting everyone be part of the journey, even if their names are absent from it. A live stream video feed (below) of NASA employees building the Europa Clipper is broadcast daily on NASA’s YouTube channel.

Graphic and logo provided to Travels With The Post by NASA, used with permission