As you can probably tell from my recent post on Patrick Stewart, I’m a certified space buff. I no longer track the details of our space program but I’m always interested in new happenings. I was really surprised, therefore, when I saw this article on the space shuttle Discovery. It turns out that someone has just noticed that the ‘S’ in “Discovery” on the starboard side is upside down.
It’s pretty subtle and you have to be a bit of a typography nerd to notice but the Helvetica ‘S’ is a bit wider on the bottom. Imagine it: Discovery flew for 27 years and no one noticed. Or at least no one mentioned it. The letters were applied by using stencils so it’s easy to understand how it could have happened. One of the commenters noted that the ‘S’ is right on a seam, which may have made it more difficult to see the problem. In any event, as everyone commenting on it says, once it’s pointed out, you can’t unsee it.
None of this is really important, of course. At most, it’s an amusing deviation from NASA’s obsessive attention to detail. As the article at the link points out, NASA even had detailed, written instructions on what text on the orbiters should look like. They forgot to mention that the stencils should be placed right side up.