NASA Orbiter Vehicle Designation: OV-101 was named the Enterprise by President Gerald Ford in response to a letter campaign by Trekkies seeking honor for mankind’s first space ship. STAR TREK fans should have been more patient, because the Enterprise was an experimental craft designed without engines or a thermal heat shield for testing in the atmosphere. After completion of these trials the Enterprise was stripped of all vital equipment. It never touched the sky.

In 1983 I was standing by the Seine by the Tullieries in Paris. Upon hearing the roar of a low-flying jet I looked up and spotted a NASA 747 piggybacking the decommissioned test shuttle. The French authorities had refused NASA a fly-over on the way to the Air Show at Le Bourget., but the pilot must have executed one and as a Trekkie my heart soared with pride.

“We are going to the stars.” I was ignorant of the Enterprise’s flightlessness and remained bliss until reading about the test space shuttle in the morning Times, which announced that the Enterprise would be flying atop a 747 this morning.

I checked the clock on the Williamsburg Bank.

11:01.

The fly-by was scheduled for 11:05.

I shouted down to AP. My landlord and I scrambled to the roof of his Fort Greene brownstone. We are kids at heart. I had binoculars. He was holding a camera with a long lens. The sky was clear and helicopters flittered to the west.

“They have to be following its flight.”

I agreed with his hunch.

Sadly our azimuth was too low to allow a sighting of the Enterprise’s passage.

“I think it’s gone.”

“Yes, but it will be transported to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum by barge some time in the summer.

“We could bicycle over to Battery Park.”

“It’s only 15 minutes away.” Via the Brooklyn Bridge.

We high-fived each other like 12 year-olds.

NASA might have abandoned the stars, but we never will.

Live long and prosper.