313/11:37:17 MSP Confuses people. And it sure confuses me. For instance, our space travelers’ “calendar.” We count our days from the moment we left the ground, aboard our Saturn VB booster, from the Jacqueline B. Kennedy Space Center. So, to us, today is MET 313 days — that’s three hundred and thirteen days of Mission Elapsed Time, more than three hundred days since we left Earth. While to you, it is a plain old Tuesday, January 28, 1986. And this business of the call signs is another problem. Why is it that spacecraft sometimes have call signs — individual names, like Apollo 11’s Eagle and Columbia — and at other times Houston will refer to us as just, say, “Ares”? The answer is that we need to use call signs when there is more than one separate spacecraft involved in a flight, and they need to be distinguished in our radio conversations. And that’s going to be true on this flight, when we get to Mars in a couple of months’ time, and we land on the surface in our MEM. Unlike the Apollo missions to the Moon, we decided not to choose the names for our separate craft until now, until after the launch, as we haven’t needed them. As a crew we thought we’d prefer to spend some of the long transfer time to Mars on thinking about that.

313/11:38:18 MMP Sure. That’s what we did. Rather than watch videotapes of the Super Bowl.

313/11:38:25 CDR [INAUDIBLE]

313/11:38:28 MSP So today I’m going to tell you what names we’ve chosen. I know we have a lot of children listening today, at schools, and I hope this will bring alive some of the history lessons you have, and you’ll be able to see how what we’re doing today, in our exploration of Mars, is really an extension of the great journeys you can read about in your texts. Phil, if you…

313/11:38:46 CDR Sure. We’ve decided to name our spacecraft after famous exploration sailing ships of the past, uh, in line with what Natalie’s just said. And I’m particularly pleased with the name we’ve given to our Mission Module — that is, the place we’re living in during the voyage — because it was from the Mission Module that we conducted our study of Venus, as we flew past that planet. And we’ve decided to name it after the sailing ship which Captain James Cook commanded to Tahiti in 1769, to watch a transit of Venus across the sun: Endeavor. Ralph…

313/11:39:17 MMP Yeah. Then there’s our Apollo, which we’ll use to return to Earth. We’ve chosen the name Discovery. That’s actually for two ships: the one Henry Hudson captained in 1610, in his search for a northwest passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and another of the ships Cook captained, when he visited Hawaii, and Alaska, and western Canada. Back to Natalie.