The Space Shuttle Discovery and its seven member crew launched early this morning on a 13-day mission to deliver scientific experiments, equipment and supplies to the International Space Station.

One of the items in the payload is a treadmill for the astronauts — called the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill, or COLBERT.

And, in case you haven’t heard, it is named after Stephen Colbert, host of The Colbert Report on Comedy Central.

Jacob Keaton is a NASA space station program analyst and manager of NASA’s Name the Node Contest.

He explains how Colbert became associated with the treadmill.

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