On a side note, does anyone know why it’s designated “USS”? Doesn’t that mean “United States Ship”? Isn’t the federation a kind of whole earth effort? I know that there’s an actual US aircraft carrier with that name, but I thought space travel was nonpartisan.
You think that’s confusing… Starfleet was originally UESPA, the United Earth Space Probe Agency. And there have been some very laudable, but still very poor, attempts to reconcile that… especially in Enterprise… but it just makes no sense based on the rest of Star Trek.
If you look at it through the lens of “it was just people writing a script and having no idea it would become a much-scrutinized cultural icon”…. It makes enough sense.
