More than four decades ago, King Charles III got a close look at NASA’s first space shuttle, a test vehicle known as the Enterprise.
Charles Enterprise and its crew of four astronauts were greeted at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California on October 26, 1977, shortly after the shuttle completed its fifth and final “free flight” in Earth’s atmosphere.
NASA gave Charles, a 28-year-old prince at the time, a memorial photo album that day. He also scored an original watercolor by space artist Robert McCall.
Related: NASA’s Space Shuttle Program in Pictures: Tribute
The Enterprise was built to test the shuttle design on test flights in Earth’s atmosphere. The car had no heat shield or functional engines; It was carried aloft by NASA’s Flying Shuttle, and then dropped aloft.
Enterprise has completed five such free flights, with two NASA astronauts each time. These two people were either Fred Hayes and Gordon Fullerton (Crew 1) or Joe Engel and Richard Trulli (Crew 2).
Charles — who became king after the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, on September 8, 2022 but is officially crowning today (May 6) — met all four of his crewmates on October 26, 1977.
Although Enterprise never made it to space, five orbiters: Atlantis, Challenger, Columbia, Discovery and Endeavor combined to fly 135 space missions between April 1981 and the program’s end in July 2011.
Two of those 135 missions ended in tragedy: Challenger and its crew of seven astronauts went missing shortly after launch in January 1986, and Columbia crashed during its return to Earth in February 2003, killing all seven astronauts on board.
The three surviving orbiters in space are in museums now, as is Enterprise. Since 2012, the experimental shuttle has been on display at the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City.
Mike Wall is the author of “outside (Opens in a new tab)Book (Major Grand Publishers, 2018; illustration by Carl Tate), a book about the search for aliens. Follow him on Twitter @employee (Opens in a new tab). Follow us on Twitter @employee (Opens in a new tab) or Facebook (Opens in a new tab).
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