Although I was born in the Apollo Era, barely, the spacecraft that I think had the most influence on my childhood had to be the space shuttles. I remember poring over diagrams and drawings of the shuttles in National Geographic brochures, where they even distracted my attention from the Forbidden Nipples seen on some of the other pages. I remember watching the first launch of the Colombia shuttle in 1981, I remember the Challenger tragedy in 1986, and I remember covering the process of moving the Endeavor orbiter through the streets of Los Angeles to its eventual home at the California Science Center. And most recently, I took my son to see the Discovery orbiter at the Udvar-Hazy Center outside Washington, DC. It’s that orbiter I want to talk about specifically, because I saw a post on social media about the Discovery orbiter that caught my attention and held it with the kind of fierce grip I imagine Miss Piggy employs on Kermit’s impossibly thin limbs when they’re alone. That post was on Threads and I just figured out how to embed a post from that site, so here you can see for yourself: Wait, what? Does Discovery have a backwards ‘s’ in its name? How the hell did that happen? Astronauts and NASA staff used to consider Discovery to be the crown jewel of the space shuttle. It was recognized as the most reliable and best performing of all the orbiters, and had the most missions and time in space. Since it was first launched in 1984, Discovery has completed 39 missions, spending a total of one full year in space and traveling 150 million miles. The thing flew for 27 years and somehow no one noticed that the ‘s’ was backwards in the name text on the starboard side? I mean, I guess I should be more understanding; I’ve seen it a few times and never realized it, and it wasn’t until tonight that I looked at some old photos I took of Discovery the last time I was there and saw, holy shit, the Threads guy was right. That ‘s’ is rotated 180°. Image: Jason Torchinsky Now, the typography on the shuttle orbiters follows NASA’s carefully planned and strictly enforced graphic and typography guidelines, which state that the font used on the spacecraft must be Helvetica Medium: Image: NASA Okay, let’s take a look at the typography on the orbiter: Image: Jason Torchinsky (the ‘r’ in the font I used there also feels a little different, but this gets the message across and I have to move on). flight in a few hours, so I’ll let it slide) It’s a subtle difference, but as you can see, the name on the starboard side definitely has that inverted ‘s’. It’s subtle, but the Helvetica ‘s’ is a little wider at the bottom, giving the letter a slightly more settled appearance. Here, look: Image: Jason Torchinsky You can see the difference there, right? I feel like once it’s pointed out, you can’t help but notice it. The ‘v’ on the port side also seems oddly thick, now that I look at it. I’m told that the graphics on these orbiters were applied using large stencils and special space paint, and I’m sure the complex curves of the fuselage did not make applying these elements easy. It’s understandable that a lettering template would be flipped, but I’m a little surprised that it’s never been corrected in its 27 year lifespan. Image: Jason Torchinsky All other graphics and typography are applied with impressive precision; maybe there were people who knew the ‘s’ was wrong, but they liked that subtle imperfection as it adds character to the spaceship. I get it, absolutely. If I were in charge, I would have let it go too. Image: Jason Torchinsky I still can’t believe I’ve never seen this before; As a typography geek and a space geek who has spent too much time looking at images of spaceships in books and online, you would think I would have come across this before, but no. Or if I did, it didn’t make enough of an impression for me to notice or consciously remember it. But now that it’s there? I can’t stop seeing it. And I’m kind of delighted by that.
