"Enterprise" Rollout 45 Years Ago

The following was posted yesterday on Facebook:

It is hard to believe that the rollout took place 45 years ago.

I was able to see the Enterprise up close in July 1977 when I visited Mitch Geriminsky at Edwards Air Force Base. He was stationed at Edwards and had clearance to different areas on the base. We went to the hangar where the Enterprise was kept and the photo below was taken during our visit.

The shuttle prototype got its Enterprise name from a petition drive of Star Trek fans. They actually should have waited to have an actual space shuttle be named Enterprise instead.

Flying Wing and Space Shuttle "Columbia"

After putting the car into the garage for the night, I was rummaging through one moving box and found a metal filing box.

I went through the box when I got back into the house and found a number of things inside, such as my high school diploma, silver dollar proof sets and other stuff.

I saw two large envelopes. I looked in them and found a couple of 8 x 10" photos of the famed Northrop "Flying Wing" in one and several photos of the space shuttle Columbia.

The shuttle photos came from an open house at the Rockwell International plant in Downey, California I attended. It was a "welcome home" event for the most recent shuttle astronauts (it may have been the crew for the second or third shuttle mission in 1981).

I have no idea where the "Flying Wing" photos came from. They could have been from an air show or some other event (I attended a lot of them back in the day). One of the photos had "Northrop" rubber-stamped on the back.

In any case, I scanned both "Flying Wing" photos and a couple of the Columbia photos.

Here they are: