Without today’s internet, Trekkies managed to pull together and launch a vigorous letter-writing campaign to the White House to have OV-101 named after the iconic spaceship commanded by James T. Star Trek fans, however, had a better idea. Fletcher told his higher-ups in Washington that NASA would call it the Constitution and be unveiled on September 17, 1976-the anniversary of when the United States Constitution was officially adopted. “There were originally plans to retrofit OV-101 and make it the second operational shuttle orbiter, but during the course of development it became clear that the cost of making Enterprise space-worthy would be excessive.”Įnterprise was not the vehicle’s intended name. “ Enterprise was not built to fly in space–it was missing key systems,” explained NASA’s Chief Historian Bill Barry to the Observer. NASA completed this vehicle, that would later be known as Enterprise, in 1976. NASA finalized a prototype design called Orbital Vehicle 101 (OV-101) in 1974 which would act as a test vehicle that will never actually leave Earth’s atmosphere. Fletcher presenting a Space Shuttle concept to President Nixon in 1972. Three months later, Congress approved funding to build it. Fletcher would present a space shuttle concept to President Nixon in San Clemente, California on January 5th, 1972. After a few years of conceptualization and redesigns, NASA Administrator Dr. In 1968, NASA officially began work on what they called the Integrated Launch and Reentry Vehicle and a year later, President Richard Nixon would throw his support behind the agency’s endeavour to build this spacecraft. A decade later, during the mid-sixties, the Air Force would conduct top-secret research into these kinds of vehicles and determined that a reusable design was possible and cost-effective. Before the space agency we know today, there was NACA-the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics-and they were the first to consider a spacecraft that could journey to space and back, landing horizontally on a runway much like a commercial airliner. The journey of the Enterprise began before the Apollo era and even before NASA technically existed.
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