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| International Station |
 Title text: Welcome to the International Space Station Exclamation Point! |
Explanation
This joke makes fun of the parity between 'space', as in the invisible character between words, and 'space', as in the void between astronomical bodies. In this case, it is said that the word 'space' was never meant to be part of the name of the station, but was included as a word due to a transcription error.
The presumption is therefore that someone thought it necessary to say the name as "International (space) Station," perhaps to quash any misconception that the intended name might be "InternationalStation" (however capitalised). Someone else would have written this down as International Space Station, with the accidental name being accepted due to the resulting name being acceptably apt or inconvenient to change.
The title text furthers the joke by transcribing the exclamation mark at the end of the phrase, similar to 3143: Question Mark. There were also multiple examples of strings, with punctuation (literal and otherwise) and spelling easy to misconvey in 1963: Namespace Land Rush, though none of them used either spaces or "space"s. The full name of "International Space Station Exclamation Point" may also sound like it refers to a location in the International Space Station by the name of "Exclamation Point". In a similar vein, when customers order signboards, they sometime come with unintended quotation marks. The customer writes the signage text with quotation marks, with the expectation that the signmaker will ignore them.
The ISS made the news on 15 January 2026, the day prior to the release of this comic, due to the unprecedented evacuation of some crewmembers to Earth for medical reasons.
While the ISS had other names during its design, such as Space Station Freedom or Alpha, it does not appear that NASA or Roscosmos literally originally referred to it as just International Station. The Russian name for it is "Международная Kосмическая Cтанция" (MKC) or "Mezhdunaródnaya Kosmícheskaya Stántsiya", which translates as "International Space Station" using the cosmic, non-punctuation meaning of "space".
Transcript
- [Ponytail is talking to Cueball. They seem to be floating in a weightless environment, surrounded by a wrench, a book, two sheets of paper and some debris.]
- Ponytail: You know, NASA and Roscosmos actually originally named it the International Station, but a translation issue led someone to accidentally transcribe the formatting.
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