Star Trek Honor for Space Shuttle Discovery

At 3:23 am ET this morning (March 7, 2011), NASA gave a fitting tribute to the Space Shuttle Discovery as she wraps up her final mission. The Discovery astronauts were awoken with a very special version of the introduction to the original Star Trek TV series.

As a surprise to honor Discovery’s decades of hard work and exploration, NASA had William Shatner (Star Trek’s Captain Kirk) rerecord the introduction:

“Space. The final frontier. These have been the voyages of Space Shuttle Discovery. Her thirty year mission – To seek out new science. To build new outposts. To bring nations together on the final frontier. To boldly go and do what no spacecraft has done before.”

It was a fitting and well-deserved honor for this workhorse of NASA’s Space Shuttle fleet.