Contest winner's playlist will be sent to space aboard iPod
As if there weren't enough reasons to want to be a kid again, the European Space Agency is holding a contest for children 18-and-under that requires crafting the perfect playlist for astronauts floating around the International Space Station -- and the lucky winner scores a trip to South America to watch an iPod loaded with his/her tunes launched aboard the agency's Automated Transfer Vehicle. In a twist on the old "What would you bring to a desert island" question, the contest -- which is only open to residents of EU countries participating in the ATV program -- asks entrants to envision what ten songs they'd want to listen to (guess they're only sending up a shuffle) as they orbited 400 kilometers above the Earth, and although the rules don't specifically prohibit it, we imagine that entries which include "Major Tom," "Free Fallin'," or "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (not to mention anything by the Beatles) will be immediately disqualified. Now when the 20-tonne vehicle heads off towards the ISS later this year, it certainly won't be carrying the first iPod into orbit -- Anousheh Ansari famously brought hers up last year, among others -- and with the "Gates in Space" story now definitively debunked (tourist Charles Simonyi attributed the rumor to a Russian press "notorious for their fabrications") it looks as though space -- much like many places on Earth -- will remain a decidedly Zune-free zone for the foreseeable future.
