"Bizi Betiko" is Basque for "Live Forever".
The Mormon starship is named The Nauvoo. In 1839 the Mormons bought a small town in Illinois and named it Nauvoo (Hebrew for 'beautiful place'). The town was at first a refuge for persecuted Mormons then a place to flee from during the exodus to Utah. Today Nauvoo, Illinois is a tourism destination for Mormons.
The tool Joe uses to retrieve the data crypt is an Eppendorf pipette (with a metal barrel added), used for liquid handling in Biochemical laboratories.
Regarding meteors, Avasalara is worried about people who throw rocks. Since the 1960s Science Fiction writers, and a few real world military strategists, have written about using inert mass warheads as aimed meteors. Nudging asteroids out of the belt and in toward Earth could give you an astoundingly big bang for your buck; a rock the size of a minivan could have a blast effect in the kiloton range. The only tricky part is accurately hitting specific ground based targets.
The escape vessel is named "Tachi'; that is Japanese for "us".