PRODUCT DETAILS Endeavour first flew in May 1992 and its last mission was in May 2011. She is named after the British HMS Endeavour, the ship which took Captain James Cook on his first voyage of discovery (1768�1771). This is why the name is spelled in the British English manner, rather than the American English ("Endeavor"). Endeavour was named through a national competition involving students in elementary and secondary schools. Endeavour was the most popular entry, accounting for almost one-third of the state-level winners. The Space Shuttle orbiter was a reusable winged "space-plane", a mixture of rockets, spacecraft, and aircraft. This space-plane could carry crews and payloads into low Earth orbit, perform on-orbit operations, then re-enter the atmosphere and land as a glider, returning its crew and any on-board payload to the Earth. The Space Shuttle Orbiter resembled an aircraft in its design, and was roughly the same size as a McDonnell Douglas DC-9 airliner. This handcrafted model is painstakingly built by our skilled craftsmen with a wealth of detail and makes a great gift for any space buff or history fan.
Endeavour, the last addition to the orbiter fleet, is named after the first ship commanded by James Cook, the 18th century British explorer, navigator and astronomer. On Endeavour's maiden voyage in August 1768, Cook sailed to the South Pacific (to observe and record the infrequent event of the planet Venus passing between the Earth and the sun). Determining the transit of Venus enabled early astronomers to find the distance of the sun from the Earth, which then could be used as a unit of measurement in calculating the parameters of the universe. In 1769, Cook was the first person to fully chart New Zealand (which was previously visited in 1642 by the Dutchman Abel Tasman from the Dutch province of Groningen). Cook also surveyed the eastern coast of Australia , navigated the Great Barrier Reef and traveled to Hawaii. Cook's voyage on the Endeavour also established the usefulness of sending scientists on voyages of exploration. While sailing with Cook, naturalist Joseph Banks and Carl Solander collected many new families and species of plants, and encountered numerous new species of animals. Endeavour and her crew reportedly made the first long-distance voyage on which no crewman died from scurvy, the dietary disease caused by lack of ascorbic acids. Cook is credited with being the first captain to use diet as a cure for scurvy, when he made his crew eat cress, sauerkraut and an orange extract. The Endeavour was small at about 368 tons, 100 feet in length and 20 feet in width. In contrast, its modern day namesake is 78 tons, 122 feet in length and 78 feet wide. The Endeavour of Captain Cook's day had a round bluff bow and a flat bottom. The ship's career ended on a reef along Rhode Island.