July 13, 2007—Tip of the hat to my colleague Todd Halvorson of Florida Today for a news story that prompted a grammatical chuckle. Space Shuttle Endeavour is on the launch pad for a planned August flight. NASA technicians typically hang a banner on the security fence around the pad to get the launch team "pumped up".

The blue banner in today’s story read "Go Endeavor!" in big white letters.

That sent NASA and, coincidentally the publisher of my upcoming book, busily making revisions. The space agency named its last space shuttle after His Majesty’s Bark "Endeavour", a British vessel commanded by Captain James Cook who sailed to Tahiti among his other adventures. The British spelling of Endeavour includes the letter "u". Endeavor is the American version, so a new NASA banner will be put up.

University Press of Florida is in the process of printing the dust jackets for my book "Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program" which is due out in October. The editors asked me to look at the rough draft of the copy for the jacket to make sure everything was kosher, and sure enough, "Endeavor" minus the elusive British "u" was present. A quick phone call, and an explanation that left me feeling rather anal retentive, resolved the matter. University Press was very understanding.

I’ll have to check to back to see if any similar problems occurred during Apollo 15 in 1971, since the Command Module that carried the astronauts to the moon was called Endeavor….er, Endeavour.

Photo courtesy of NASA