by Jason Snell

Typo found on 42-year-old spaceship

Jason Torchinsky at The Autopian joins me in shock at the revelation that the Helvetica S on the space shuttle Discovery is upside-down:

Wait, what? Discovery has an upside-down ‘s’ in its name? How the hell did that happen? Discovery was usually considered, by astronauts and NASA people, the jewel in the Space Shuttle crown. It was recognized to be 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 completed 39 missions, spent in total a full year in space, and traveled 150 million miles.

The thing flew for 27 years, and somehow nobody noticed that the ‘s’ was upside down on the starboard side name text?

[Via Paul Lukas’s Inconspicuous Consumption.]