The real Enterprise
Keeping on the Space Shuttle riff, here's the first ever orbiter embarking on a glide down to the surface after a ride on the back of a 747 (click on the pic for a better view).
Enterprise was originally christened Constitution but NASA changed its name after a campaign by Star Trek fans.
It was constructed - between 1974-76 - without engines or a heat shield, as it was meant to perform test flights in the atmosphere.
NASA did toy with the idea of refitted Enterprise for orbital flight - it would have been second Space Shuttle to fly after Columbia - but due to changes in design and costs the craft was shelved.
The shuttle almost made a comeback after the Challenger explosion as NASA needed a replacement. However, it proved to be cheaper to use spares to build Endeavour.
Enterprise, which can be viewed at Washington Dulles International Airport, came into its own during the investigation into the Columbia accident when fiberglass panels from one of its wings was used to find out the cause of the disaster.
Weird Science Factoid: If the sun was made of coal, it would have burnt out within ten million years. And there would be a terrible problem with ash.
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
