/STG/ - Star Trek General

He was in three plane crashes, two of them with him at the wheel, and survived all three.

Yup, pretty much this. We even see that, during wartime, the focus of Starfleet realigns as needed. And back again, once the war is over.

True, true. Apologies for the oversight.

>at the wheel
Well, that explains why he crashed. How are you supposed to pitch up with a wheel?

Earth Starfleet is clearly a successor org to NASA if you count ENT. NASA uses a military ish rank structure, with mission leaders called Commander and so on. We see the ISS in the intro too.
>which actually makes ENT and anything referencing it a distinct timeline from TOS since the ISS presumes our own history rather than the TOS backstory

Starfleet can also be compared with the NOAA, which has its own fleet of scientific research ships crewed by uniformed officers commissioned under authority of the President, with the same rank structure and chain command as naval officers, and can in fact be militarized by the President under emergency situations. Obviously Starfleet isn't entirely like that, but it could probably describe a good chunk of the science department in terms of how they view their job and the role of Starfleet.

It also fits the "science vessels are spookshit" meme, since NOAA vessels were often instructed to investigate or retrieve sunken Soviet naval equipment.

That would be accurate if the NOAA had carriers, cruisers, etc fully armed all the time and we had no other military. Unless the Federation has some other military I'm unaware of.

I literally just said in the post you quoted that Starfleet didn't operate entirely like the NOAA, just there being some influence. Starfleet could be thought of as a weird love child between the NOAA, NASA, and actual military.

Why couldn't there be an International Space Station in Star Trek's timeline?