These are the voyages of the space shuttle Enterprise, boldly renamed by former President Gerald Ford after a massive letter-writing campaign from Star Trek fans.
In 1974, construction of the world’s first space shuttle, known then as Orbital Vehicle-101 (OV-101), began at Rockwell Corporation’s plant in Downey, California. (The city, located in Los Angeles County, is known to fast food enthusiasts as the home to the oldest operating McDonald’s and the birthplace of Taco Bell.) With the debut of the spacecraft set for 1976, it was rechristened the Constitution in honor of the U.S. bicentennial.
But, as Spock himself, Leonard Nimoy, joked at a ceremony for the shuttle decades later, “Star Trek fans can be very persuasive.”
Richard Nixon’s Prime Directive: Don’t Blow the Budget
In 1972, the Apollo program was coming to an end. If John F. Kennedy inspired the nation with his call to “go to the moon” and “do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” Richard Nixon’s rhetoric was less soaring.
“The space shuttle will give us routine access to space by sharply reducing costs in dollars and preparation time,” he said, as reported at the time by Popular Science. In the wake of the moon landings, NASA Administrator Thomas Paine had grand visions for America’s space program. He proposed sending men to Mars in nuclear-powered spacecraft, building space stations and bases along the way, according to the The Space Shuttle Decision by T.A. Heppenheimer.
Alas, interplanetary travel was not in the stars. When Robert Mayo, Nixon’s budget director, cut $1 billion from NASA’s budget, Paine focused on a less ambitious part of his proposal: a reusable shuttle. Even that project was nearly axed by Congress for budgetary reasons, Heppenheimer wrote. Once NASA found supporters in the Department of Defense, however, the space shuttle program was on solid ground. The first shuttle, the Enterprise, would only be used for testing. It was the second, the Columbia, that had the honor of being the first space shuttle to launch into orbit. It blasted off on April 12, 1981, exactly two decades after Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space.
The Enterprise never traveled among the stars. But it paved the way for future space shuttles, which would spend 30 years ferrying astronauts and supplies into space, deploying satellites, and eventually making the International Space Station a reality.
Star Trek Lives Long and Prospers
Nixon announced the space shuttle program in 1972, the same year that the first Star Trek convention was held in New York City. Four years earlier, the show survived a brush with death after fan letters convinced NBC executives to renew the show for a third season. But in 1969, the same year that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, the show was canceled. Its 79 episodes, however, would live on in syndication. When President Gerald Ford took responsibility for the space shuttle program after Nixon left office, he discovered how passionate Star Trek fans could be.
In a now declassified memo, Ford’s advisors asked the president for approval to change the name of the Constitution to the Enterprise. “NASA has received hundreds of thousands of letters from the space-oriented ‘Star Trek’ group asking that the name ‘Enterprise’ be given to the craft,” wrote William Gorog, noting that use “of the name would provide a substantial human interest appeal to the rollout ceremonies scheduled for this month in California.”
Jim Cannon, another presidential advisor and later Ford’s biographer, loved the idea. “It would be personally gratifying to several million followers of the television show ‘Star Trek’, one of the most dedicated constituencies in the country,” he wrote.
Not everyone was on board. Advisor Bob Hartmann noted that Enterprise was an “especially hallowed Naval name” and he thought the “Navy should keep it.” Another advisor, Jack Marsh, said he approved of the name itself but didn’t appreciate it being chosen because of a “T.V. fad.”
Ford chose to embrace Star Trek fandom. When the Enterprise rolled out of its hangar in 1976, an Air Force band played the Star Trek theme. Nimoy was there, along with several of his castmates, including Nichelle Nichols and George Takei. The ship would take its maiden voyage in Earth’s atmosphere in 1977, two years before the franchise was revived on the big screen in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Today, fans can visit the real-life Enterprise on the deck of the USS Intrepid, part of the Intrepid Museum in New York City and a testament to the power of Trekkies in America.
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