And do we have some astronauts lined up...

Stan Schroeder has a blog posting about NASA's hot plans:

If you’ve seen Danny Boyle’s movie Sunshine, you may be a little disappointed: NASA’s mission to visit the Earth’s Sun won’t include sending people up there. But it will be sending a spacecraft into the Sun’s atmosphere, approximately four million miles from its surface. The project, called Solar Probe Plus, is slated to launch sometime before 2018.
Four million miles doesn’t sound very close, but it’s still very exciting, since this is a region no other spacecraft (created by us) has ever encountered. NASA plans for the project to “unlock the sun’s biggest mysteries”. Although the spacecraft will be relatively far from our star’s surface, its carbon-composite heat shield will have to withstand intense radiation, as well as temperatures exceeding 2550 degrees Fahrenheit.
“The experiments selected for Solar Probe Plus are specifically designed to solve two key questions of solar physics: why is the sun’s outer atmosphere so much hotter than the sun’s visible surface, and what propels the solar wind that affects Earth and our solar system?” said Dick Fisher, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division in Washington. “We’ve been struggling with these questions for decades and this mission should finally provide those answers,” said Fisher.

Rico says you can make your own list, but surely (in spite of NASA's reluctance) there are some politicians and/or television commentators we can all agree should pilot this mission...