Brief Scrapbook About
the Newest New Yorker

As the Space Shuttle Enterprise arrived at the Intrepid Museum this week, and it’s getting ready to greet the locals at its new home, let’s take a quick look at what we’ve found on our files about it and its distinguished sisters. NASA’s gift to New York may not have traveled too far out in space but it was the first to open its fleet’s storied 30-years of space flights, adventures and drama.
The Enterprise was used as a test vehicle for the other shuttles that followed it and it did fly a few times, in the late 1970s. It even went into a world tour, which introduced the then new concept of a reusable space vehicle as the next stage of human space exploration. No one can say it didn’t serve its purposes of making travel for future astronauts a lot safer.
While it lacks crucial features incorporated in all other crafts of its fleet, such as the thermal protection system and radar equipment, for example, its overall design and interior configuration are pretty close to the others. The idea of retrofitting it and preparing it for orbit was abandoned due to costs, though, and it remained an oddity once the program started rolling.
In other words, a typical New Yorker already: ‘different,’ eclectic, slightly under-achiever, but, ultimately, not really interested in being like everyone else. The Enterprise will receive its guests at first under a temporary tent, just like newcomers to the city who crash at their friends’ studio for a few months, before finding their own place.
The Intrepid Museum will eventually build a special enclosure to its new resident, but way before that it’ll hopefully have achieved what we all expect from it: to fire up the imagination of thousands of school kids who, from mid-July on, are expected to visit and get a closer look at what a real spacecraft looks and feels like.
Other cities may have gotten higher-mileage shuttles than the Enterprise. Some of those have a lot of history, and stories to tell, about their trips to the Space Station, or the Hubble Telescope, for example. Then again, many didn’t even get one. We celebrate the fact that New York got its own and it’s special. We’re sure it’ll make us proud (and them all, jealous, for good measure).

Above, the Space Shuttle Enterprise flying free on March of 1978. Below, clockwise, its official logo, departing from Washington DC to New York, atop a 747 Boeing, its first fly over the city, in 1983, and at its Sept. 17, 1976 dedication, with Star Trek’s author Gene Roddenberry and cast of the TV series.

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For More Colltales Space Coverage, Read:

Final Blast
Welcome Home
Space Landmarks
Waiting For Discovery
Farewell Mission
Countdown
Up Up and Away
The Longest Trip
Back for Good