It happened in 1976....

[Grand Torino]

On Sept. 17, 1976, NASA's prototype space shuttle Enterprise was rolled out of its assembly facility in Southern California and displayed before a crowd several thousand strong. Though Enterprise was a test vehicle that never reached space, its completion in some ways marked the true beginning of the space shuttle era.

Various dignitaries were on hand to mark the occasion, including many castmembers from the original "Star Trek" television series, which had debuted 10 years earlier (the 45th anniversary of "Star Trek" was last week). Their presence was appropriate, as the prototype shuttle took its name from the sleek starship commanded by the fictional Captain James Tiberius Kirk.

This had not always been so; the shuttle's original name was Constitution. But a massive write-in campaign by "Star Trek" fans urged President Gerald Ford to go with Enterprise, and he eventually acquiesced.

 

Though Enterprise broadly resembled future space shuttles, the prototype differed in several key ways.

"At its core — its airframe — Enterprise was like its space-worthy shuttle siblings, but it was never outfitted with many of the systems that would have ultimately made it capable of orbiting the Earth," said space history expert Robert Pearlman, editor of the website collectSPACE.com and a frequent SPACE.com contributor.

"For example," Pearlman added, "its outer surface was mostly fiberglass instead of the thermal protection system tiles and (later) blankets that covered [the shuttle] Columbia."

At 150,000 pounds (68,000 kilograms), Enterprise was also considerably lighter than the five space-flown orbiters — primarily because it lacked the powerful shuttle main engines. The shuttle Challenger, for example, had an empty weight of about 175,000 pounds (79,000 kg), according to NASA records.