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posted 08-26-2006 04:47 PM               

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The current trend appears to be to use lowercase. Thus, "space shuttle" or "shuttle."

When naming the orbiters, it is "space shuttle Discovery" or "shuttle Atlantis."

The Associated Press uses this format and as a result, many (including NASA) do, too.

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Posts: 1012
From: Denver, CO USA
Registered: Oct 2002

posted 08-27-2006 07:33 PM               

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NASA likely follows the aggressively "up" or "uppercase" style favored by the GPO and deplored by scholarly publishers.

Italicizing ships, however, is a convention everyone honors. But I think names of missions — say Apollo 13 — are spelled roman (unitalicized). Freedom 7, however, as a ship, would appear in italics. Too bad NASA chose, sometime during Gemini, to drop the honorable tradition of naming its spacecraft.

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From: Huntsville, AL, USA
Registered: Jun 2003

posted 08-28-2006 09:59 AM               

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Current NASA Portal style is that space shuttle is lowercase on its own, but capitalized before the name of an orbiter.

Brent Jett is a space shuttle commander. He will fly on the Space Shuttle Atlantis.

International Space Station is capitalized, but shorter forms, Space Station or Station, are not.

It's worth noting that this is only for the web documents, which use modified AP style; internal documents still frequently use GPO, which, as noted, tends more towards capitilization.

Also, the web guidelines have changed back and forth multiple times just over the past few years. (Meaning anything in the SP-7084, published in 1998, would be too out of date to be official.)

Also also, everything above applies only to NASA; others have other styles.

So, in short — Is "shuttle" upper- or lowercased? Depends on who you ask, when you ask them, and what the context is.

My advice — if this is for a particular outlet, see if they have a preference. If not, figure out what you think makes the most sense, and do that consistently.