With space shuttle Endeavour, the youngest of the fleet, scheduled to blast off on its final mission Friday afternoon, this seems an appropriate time to post the following, a NASA-produced video overview of the shuttle program narrated by none other than Captain James T. Kirk himself. Blow this one up to full-screen size… there’re some great clips here, including a time lapse of the crawler carrying Endeavour out to the launch pad, archival footage of the lifting bodies that were tested early in the shuttle’s design phase (think of the opening from The Six Million Dollar Man), and film of the mid-70s glide and landing tests using the prototype shuttle Enterprise.

It looks to me like this might be part of a longer documentary, considering it only touches the surface of the shuttle program, completely ignoring the Challenger and Columbia disasters and equally failing to mention the many, many achievements such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the ISS, and the Buck Rogers-style untethered spacewalks using the Manned Maneuvering Unit. If this does turn out to be a preview of a full-length doc, put me down for a DVD copy…

Incidentally, I found it interesting that Enterprise was originally supposed to be called the Constitution, considering that Star Trek‘s fictional Enterprise is — are you ready for this? — a Constitution-class starship. And yes, I know exactly what a tremendous nerd I am, thank you for mentioning it…