> I wonder how much space exploration could be financed by auctioning off naming rights. My favorite part about this is that since names are largely a social c

> I wonder how much space exploration could be financed by auctioning off naming rights. 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...