Colbert on his sweet new treadmill (Image courtesy NASA)

NASA didn’t name the node after him, but Stephen Colbert did learn that at least one piece of space hardware will bear his name: the combined operational load bearing external resistance treadmill. Astronaut Sunita Williams broke the news to Colbert on his late-night TV show yesterday.

In case you didn’t submit one of the 1 million or so votes or otherwise don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, NASA held a “Help Name Node 3″ online contest in March, asking people to choose among four names for Node 3 or submit their own. The formerly nameless node is an International Space Station module that will house many of the space station’s life support systems.

Comedy Central’s favorite late-night TV show host led a blitz campaign to get his name in space and the write-in candidate blew away NASA’s other boring (sorry, NASA) suggestions. Despite the numbers — Colbert with 230,000, Serenity with 190,000 and FartMonkey with 7, according to Colbert — NASA picked Tranquility. It kind of makes you wonder what would happen if the guy decided to lead a write-in campaign for, say, the U.S. presidency.

Watch the video of Sunita and Colbert talking space shop here. Or visit Matt Tobey’s Comedy Central Insider blog to get more scoop. Oh, and for goodness sake people, vote. NASA’s digging this online participation thing and is asking you to vote on what its biggest accomplishments are in this poll.

Do you think they should have named the node after Colbert? I do, as surely as there are fruit flies in space.

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