By Carl M. Cannon - September 17, 2013

September 17 is Constitution Day, and on this date in 1976, the first space shuttle was unveiled in the California desert. It was America’s bicentennial, a legacy President Gerald Ford was venerating in a series of speeches that year, and NASA officials believed that its choice of a name for the first airship in the fleet—the Space Shuttle Constitution—would be right up the president’s alley.

They were wrong. A couple of weeks before the unveiling, White House officials let it be known that the prototype airship was to be called the Space Shuttle Enterprise, not the Constitution.

There was more than one rationale behind that decision, but the predominant one came from popular culture.

“Space, the final frontier,” intoned the narrator on many an episode of the iconic “Star Trek” television (and, later) movie series. The mission of the Starship Enterprise, audiences were told, was to explore strange new worlds, seeking out new life and civilizations … “to boldly go where no man has gone before.”

It was evocative phrasing, more Hollywood than science—or so one might have thought. But the language apparently was borrowed from a 1958 White House report called “Introduction to Outer Space,” commissioned and signed by Dwight Eisenhower and prepared by the president’s science advisory committee.

It began by posing a simple question, one it proposes to answer: “What are the principle reasons for undertaking a national space program?” The report then delineated four factors, starting with the “compelling” urge of human beings to explore the unknown—to “go where no one has gone before.”

As for “the final frontier,” that wording seems to have been inspired by the “New Frontier,” the catchphrase used by John F. Kennedy, the president with whom Americans mostly closely associate the U.S. space program. A third president, Jerry Ford, was in office at the time the space shuttle program was coming on line—and it was Ford who evidently picked the name “Space Shuttle Enterprise.”

“Enterprise is most definitely a unique machine, right down to the origin of its name,” NASA says in its official accounting of the first shuttle orbiter. “It was originally to be named Constitution, but viewers of the popular TV show ‘Star Trek’ started a write-in campaign urging the White House to select the name Enterprise.”

This was before the Internet, mind you, but the Trekkies were well-organized. An estimated 400 magazines and bulletins existed for fans of the television show, which ran on NBC from 1966-1969. The network tried to cancel it after a second season, but was dissuaded in part by a spirited letter-writing campaign initially organized at Cal Tech.

Space Shuttle Constitution would have been a fine name—and NASA’s decision to unveil it on September 17, 1976, was a deft touch. Except that the Trekkies ginned up tens of thousands of letters suggesting the name Enterprise instead.

At the White House, there were other considerations as well. For one thing, the space shuttle program was envisioned as an international effort. Transnational cooperation was supposed to be more of a theme than American Exceptionalism. In other words, the Starship Enterprise, with its multicultural and multinational crew, was perhaps a better symbol.

Moreover, if patriotism was your thing, Enterprise fit the bill there, too. It was a storied name in U.S. naval lore: starting with a Revolutionary War sloop by that name and continuing through World War II. In the Pacific, the “Big E” was an aircraft carrier with such a fearsome reputation that the Japanese reported three times that they had sunk her. (They never did, and the Enterprise helped win the battles of Midway, Guadalcanal, and Leyte Gulf. The ship was retired in 1947 as the most decorated vessel in U.S. Navy history.) A subsequent nuclear-powered aircraft carrier of the same name was commissioned in 1961.

Ford never commented publicly on the Trekkies’ campaign, although he did tell NASA administrator James D. Fletcher that he served in the Pacific aboard a Navy ship that serviced the Big E. “I’m a little partial to the name Enterprise,” the president said. And so it was done.

NASA did not attempt to hide the influence of "Star Trek" fans, however. Quite the opposite. At the 1976 unveiling of the first space shuttle orbiter, NASA officials, astronauts, and politicians were joined by the original “Star Trek” cast members outside the Palmdale, Calif., manufacturing facility with the program’s theme song soaring through loudspeakers.

Among those present were series creator Gene Rodenberry and Leonard Nimoy, who portrayed Mr. Spock, along with DeForest Kelley (Dr. McCoy), George Takei (Mr. Sulu); James Doohan (Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott); Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura), and Walter Koenig (Ensign Pavel Chekov).

Over the next generation, America’s shuttle program would experience not one but two tragedies. And despite two major refittings, the Space Shuttle Enterprise would never actually fly in space. But that was appropriate—as it would have been if the maiden airship had been named the Constitution.

The U.S. Constitution—the document, I mean, not the proposed space shuttle—wasn’t a perfect instrument, either. It, too, has required numerous refittings, which we know as amendments. Even then it has taken civil war and civic strife and endless (and ongoing) national discourse to make the thing work. And we aren’t done yet.

Like the Starship Enterprise, the Constitution sought to boldly go where no one had gone before. Who said it would be easy?