Okay, so my birthday is coming up and something I am not wishing for is my name on a star. I don’t want my stargazing disrupted by a narcissistic search for my special dot of light. But then even if I wanted it, that tantalizing celestial real estate is not really on the market. Sure, many commercial enterprises like Star Registry or Starnamer.net will take your fifty bucks and slap you—or your loved one’s name—on some star and give you a gold-framed cheesy certificate. But the International Astronomical Union, the bouncers of the star-naming universe, would not recognize it. They have posted a very stern warning on their IAU website:

As an international scientific organization, the IAU dissociates itself entirely from the commercial practice of “selling” fictitious star names or “real estate” on other planets or moons in the Solar System…In the past, certain such enterprises have suggested to customers that the IAU is somehow associated with, recognizes, approves, or even actively collaborates in their business.  The IAU wishes to make it totally clear that any such claim is patently false and unfounded. Thus, like true love and many of the best things in human life, the beauty of the night sky is not for sale, but is free for all to enjoy.  True, the ‘gift’ of a star may open someone’s eyes to the beauty of the night sky.  This is indeed a worthy goal, but it does not justify deceiving people into believing that real star names can be bought like any other commodity.

Stars did actually sport monikers long ago, explains American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in this video. But nowadays, whether they are discovered by intrepid astronomers or lucky amateurs, stars are identified like fossils or library books. They are catalogued with letters and numbers and precise coordinates so that astronomers have an organized way to sort through the heavens. The Milky Way galaxy alone is a vast collection of more than 200 billion stars, planets, nebulae, clusters, dust and gas. We need these pioneering cartographers. That way, when regular humans start traveling through space we will have good road maps. Of course, when it comes to comets, a select few actually have a shot at stardom. The game is, you find the comet, you name it. Several of these icy bodies that release gas or dust and orbit the sun, have been named for those who discovered them: Hale-Bopp, Hyakutake, McNaught. Is that not the most stellar professional perk imaginable?

Still, a Boston Globe story—about a quest to name some celestial object after author George Plimpton—catalogues the naming requirements of lesser bodies and offers non-astronomers reasons to hope:

When it came to other extraterrestrial objects—moons, asteroids, or even craters—the rules started to get a lot more exciting. So-called trans-Neptunian objects, the ones beyond the Eighth planet, must be named for gods of the underworld or gods related to creation (hello, Pluto). The moons of Uranus must be named after characters from Shakespeare or Alexander Pope. Out among the moons of Jupiter, Celtic gods bump up against characters from Dante’s Inferno…Each member of Rush has a minor planet. Fantasia, Hammurabi, and Jerry Lewis are all out there. While Goldfinger is not named after the Bond film (it’s named after an astronomer), Vespa is named after the motor scooter.

Apparently, the remaining avenue for non-astronomers who seek galactic recognition is the asteroid. The rocky objects orbiting sun are smaller than a planet and bigger than a meteoroid. There’s no clear evidence of an atmosphere and they are less exciting than comets. It doesn’t seem the height of vanity to get your name on a rock zooming around the sun in an oval orbit maybe in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It’s a suitable and understated gift compared to a mighty star, don’t you think? Did you know asteroids can come in pink or yellow? You have 38 days to shop.

Global warming. Global recession. The health care wars. Who wouldn’t want to chuck it all and jettison oneself into space? Just like in the Star Trek movie, we’d all just hop into our space cruisers or interstellar hotrods and meet up with Spock for some time-space continuum chat. Trekkie fantasies aside, exactly how will the lucky civilians-turned-space-pioneers go where no one has gone before? Apparently there’s new technology on the horizon.

The New Scientist reports there is more spacecraft development underway than any point in the brief history of space flight.

Remember Spaceship One? In 2004, the high-speed, rocket-powered aircraft became the first privately backed spaceflight. It climbed 111 kilometers above the Earth and broke the world altitude record set by NASA four decades earlier. That achievement won the $10M Ansari X-Prize. The milestone is captured in this cheesy music video.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YWrjWWC7EI

SpaceShipOne used its rocket motor and another aircraft to take it suborbital but it never made it past the lower reaches of space. Now the spaceplane is stationed at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, where the original flying machines like the Spirit of St. Louis are suspended like enormous mobiles from the ceiling.

The wildly anticipated SpaceShipTwo, a collaboration between SpaceShipOne creator Burt Rutan and Virgin Airline magnate Richard Branson, is slated for liftoff sometime in 2011. Using a single hybrid rocket motor, the Virgin Galactic craft will be carried 50,000 feet by WhiteKnightTwo and then released. Climb aboard you space tourists! Tickets are $200,000 each.

As spectacular as that feat will be, another big challenge for Planet Earth’s spaceplane designers is to create an air-breathing engine that would power a winged craft into space and back to the runway. The buzz reported recently is about a supersonic combustion ramjet, or scramjet, which uses fast-moving compressed air and burning fuel to create thrust. NASA is working on this, as is the European Space Agency, which backed a private firm’s development of a space plane called Skylon, which is designed to use a runway just like a conventional jet.

The idea is they could be reusable and cheaper than their ballistic counterparts. Ideally, they planes could share hangers with your average commercial airliner.

But space flight wannabes who can’t shell out the mega bucks for SpaceShipTwo would be happy to discover that the government has a stimulus package designed to get more people on board. The perfectly named Space Portal is a partnership between NASA and new space companies who are focused on making cheaper space flight feasible. It is helping one company develop high-performance heat shielding.

Enough about life-saving technology, though. What really matters is seeing the Big Blue Planet in style and comfort, right?

The Enterprise spaceplane made by the German-Swiss TALIS Enterprise group, which is slated to launch a suborbital flight in 2013 and carry up to six passengers, is designed to make weightlessness as comfy as possible. The Dexinger website reports that the cabin will have ergonomic seats, which lean downward in the weightless flight phase, glare-free materials for unobstructed views, good handgrips when micro-gravity kicks in. But if you are looking for a different style, the funky yellow pod-like chairs created by Qantas Airlines’ spaceplane designers are truly out of this world.

Photo: The Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo