You could easily be the first person to see a galaxy.
I wonder how much space exploration could be financed by auctioning off naming rights.
You could easily be the first person to see a galaxy.
I wonder how much space exploration could be financed by auctioning off naming rights.
That's a big deal. Do you have any source for that? (I couldn't find it in the ones you linked). This is great for humanity as a whole, but... poor grad students who now need to rush to publish their papers even sooner.
Data from all of Roman’s surveys will be made public as soon as it is processed, with no periods of exclusive access.
https://www.nasa.gov/missions/roman-space-telescope/nasas-ro...To your question specifically, in such a scenario they would charge an obscene amount for the bandwidth so you would be strongly incentivized not to download hundreds of GB of data from them.
My favorite part about this is that since names are largely a social construct, given the right situation, we could just nullify all the paid names and start again.
Sure, whoever does this will lose a lot of credibility. But say a disliked president signs an order forcing his country to stop accepting names that were paid, it only takes nobody reinstating it. And the rest of the world also giving up on the names, of course.
So you can totally fund space exploration this way, and then society can decide that it sucked and nullify it after the buyer is dead and unable to protest. I guess the family could, but...