Long before America’s high-tech space shuttles were lofting astronauts and cargo into orbit and gliding back to Earth, a decidedly more basic version was forging a lonely path to space. Lovingly handcrafted by engineers from NASA Test Shop 4650, this often overlooked piece of space history was cobbled together from steel beams, spare engine mounts, wood and aluminium. Hand painted in a sparse all-white livery, OV-098 (as it was designated) was a playful hint at things to come; a future icon rendered like a designer kid’s toy.

The story of this forgotten “shuttle” begins in the late 70s in Huntsville, Alabama. With various branches of NASA hard at work on America’s new spaceplane, it fell to engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center to make sure all the little details would work as planned when the real thing arrived. First conceived in the 1960s, the Space Shuttle was an incredibly complex set of technological achievements working together: a reusable orbiter, a massive external fuel tank and two solid rocket boosters for extra thrust, plus the launch tower, cryogenic fuelling system and associated infrastructure. Making it all fit together on the very first attempt was crucial.

The agency had already built a very delicate and very expensive flying testbed Space Shuttle – the Enterprise – but to make sure all various cranes, runway angles and width clearances wouldn’t damage it, engineers at Marshall decided to create a real life, full-sized but much more basic version. So while much of the Space Shuttle’s design and components would be electronic, it would strangely fall to a simple physical object to double check these seemingly simple points. This fusion of physical and digital was a sign of the times: the year was 1977 and in cinemas Star Wars was wowing audiences across America with its cutting-edge combination of handcrafted sets, physical model spaceships and post-production digital effects.