Star Trek: 10 Secrets About The USS Discovery-A You Need To Know

There's a significant moment in the timeline of the USS Discovery. In fact, potentially two when it comes to planetary interactions.

Season three's second episode, Far From Home sees the Crossfield Class starship spinning through the atmosphere to crash into a glacier. While not just yet gaining the "A" suffix, it does however become the first large scale starship in Star Trek history to crashland and make a successful return to space.  Since it wasn't noted in the original Discovery edition, it's well worth a note here. For reference, Voyager didn't manage to become spaceborne again in the original Timeless timeline. No Enterprise has completely managed it because a saucer doesn't really count however good your former chief engineer. Defiant's crashland in Deep Space Nine's classic Children of Time also meant the end of it's travels in one alternative history.

But Discovery almost does this twice because in season five's opener Red Directive it drops in to shield the natives of Q'mau from an avalanche exacerbated by Moll and L'ak. Here however, alongside the USS Antares, it's just a defensive position and quickly back in orbit echoing a not too dissimilar atmospheric move by the USS Enterprise of the Kelvin Timeline in Into Darkness. 

One other thing that links this starship to the Kelvin Universe Enterprise is that both appear to have been constructed on Earth. One in Iowa and Discovery just outside San Francisco as seen in Face the Strange.