New project naming competition

CSTART recently announced its new line of up 4 projects, designed to shift some focus away from isolated, highly ambitious goals, such as mooned landings, and place it on comparatively small and simple projects which will provide the technological building blocks to facilitate a wide range of more ambitious goals in the future.  The four projects were introduced with the codenames PROJECT BALLOON, PROJECT ROCKET, PROJECT CUBESAT and PROJECT MANNEDFLIGHT.  We’d like to replace this boring and unimaginative names with new ones – names which are memorable and inspirational.  To achieve this, we’ll be having a competition so that the community can decide.

The naming competition for our new projects will proceed in much the same way as the competition for our motto did.  There will be two phases.

The candidate selection phase, which begins as soon as this blog entry is posted and lasts until roughly midnight on the 5th of October 2010. During this week-long phase, anybody and everybody can suggest names for each of our projects by posting a comment on the appropriate thread in our community at Reddit.  There are no restrictions on the mottos you can suggest: we will let upvotes and downvotes by the community weed out trolls and submissions which are considered undesirable or inappropriate by the majority.

The project naming competition threads at Reddit are:

• PROJECT BALLOON thread
• PROJECT ROCKET thread
• PROJECT CUBESAT thread
• PROJECT MANNEDFLIGHT thread

The name selection phase, which will begin immediately after the announcement of the end of the candidate selection phase and last until roughly midnight on the 12th of January 2010.  During this week-long phase, the 5 most upvoted submissions to the Reddit threads will be made the choices for poll entries in this blog.  Each member of the CSTART community will be able to vote once on one name for each project from the list of finalists.  The names which receives the most votes before the closing date will be adopted as the official names of the new projects!

Start brainstorming!