And since we don't know anything about those other eight, so there's no reason to think the Enterprise was the only one of the twelve to make it back.
Do you really believe that people a thousand years from now won't still be learning about Neil Armstrong in history class? I still question the unexamined assumption that Kirk's achievements were unique. We can't rule out the possibility that other captains achieved equally extraordinary feats. Just because we didn't see them featured on television doesn't mean they didn't happen. That is not canon, just a rather implausible allegation from the TMP novelization. Roddenberry's conceit in the preface to the book was that he was a 23rd-century TV producer who'd made an exaggerated, imperfect dramatization of Kirk's adventures and that TMP was a more accurate version due to Admiral Kirk's fact-checking -- a way to handwave all the updates and changes he made in TMP such as the redesigns of the Klingons and the technology. So he made up a lame excuse for why it was the Enterprise that was chosen for the adaptation rather than any other starship. None of it has anything remotely to do with screen canon. The only canonical source we have about the end of the 5-year mission was Icheb's oral report in "Q2," and all he said was, "Finally, in the year 2270, Kirk completed his historic five year mission and one of the greatest chapters in Starfleet history came to a close." So yes, it was historic, it was great, but we have no canonical basis for the assumption that it was unique. Not true. It didn't originate with the fans; it comes from the 1968 behind-the-scenes book The Making of Star Trek, which was written with the participation of Roddenberry and the show's production staff. There was a time when TMoST was considered the authoritative source, as definitive as the show itself; it's the source of many concepts that were taken for granted by fans despite never being stated in the show, such as Kirk being the youngest captain, the Klingon-Romulan alliance, the dish on the front of the ship being a navigational deflector, and the show being set in the 23rd century (although James Blish's novelizations established that first). It's also the reason "mind-meld" caught on as the default name for the Vulcan technique that TOS and TAS variously called mind-touch, mind-link, mind-fusion, etc. TOS only used "meld" twice in season 3, but it was the default term in TMoST and thus became the default from then on. After all, it makes perfect sense that the idea came from Roddenberry, or at least from someone on the production staff. A lead actor in his early 30s was unusually young for the commanding officer of a capital ship, a posting that normally goes to veteran officers with decades of experience. And the series bible spelled out overtly that Kirk was a seasoned veteran who'd seen hundreds of missions and emergencies. It would be more realistic to see a man in his 40s or 50s in that role, but an action-adventure TV show demanded a hero in his virile prime. So that was an inconsistency that it would've been natural for the producers to want to address.
Or, it leaves 8 ships who had unremarkable 5 year missions. Or 5 year missions which were vastly overshadowed by Kirk’s legendary one. Of course they will. But not the guys in Apollo 10 or 12
Apart from it being an idea clearly expressed by GR behind the scenes. Maybe? We still learn about Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, Caesar, Napoleon, Alexander and many more historical figures. Why would it be implausible? It's a big, dangerous galaxy. So you consider "authoritative" a given book but "implausible" another. Fascinating.
History won't even remember Burnham. For starters she didn't become a Captain until going to the future but lets not forget that she along of the rest of the crew was basically scrubbed from history. Even Spock and his parents aren't allowed to talk about her. She and the crew might be a footnote in some logs somewhere by the time PIcard is going on at best. Maybe logged in some top secret files at Starfleet Intelligence.
And presumably all twelve capital ships would be crewed with the best, most seasoned Starfleet officers, all just as capable as the Enterprise crew. I hate the conceit that the cast we happen to follow on TV has to be uniquely better than everyone else in the entire world/galaxy. That would be a stupid way for Starfleet to organize its crews. You don't put all the best people on the same ship; you distribute them evenly. It just doesn't make sense to assume that eleven other crews of the same class of ship are all mediocre or incompetent compared to Kirk's crew. And if they are all equally capable, it's statistically unlikely that all eleven would've failed to overcome as many mortal threats as the Enterprise crew did. Look -- bottom line, if you've got a program with a 92% rate of disastrous failure, that's a badly designed program. No institution would tolerate such a thing. If that were true, then rather than the Enterprise crew being hailed as exceptionally good, the entire program would be denounced as incompetently designed and in need of serious reform. I just don't buy it. I'm not making a value judgment. I'm merely correcting the assertion that it was "fanon," i.e. invented by the fans. It is apocryphal, yes, but it did not originate in fandom. It originated in The Making of Star Trek. And I wasn't saying I considered the idea authoritative; I was saying that there was a time when fandom as a whole considered everything in the book authoritative, which is why its ideas such as Kirk being the youngest captain became so widespread in fandom.
History will remember her. She helped solve the Burn problem that plagued the galaxy into chaos for a hundred years, and is probably going to figure out the DMA situation as well. She's a time traveler from the past at the forefront of Federation and Starfleet politics and, although her story has not yet ended, is very influential to the rebirth of the Federation as we see it.
Just because we haven’t heard from 8 of the Enterprise’s contemporary sister Constitution class ship, doesn’t mean that they experienced anything near as interesting as Enterprise. Not on such a consistent basis. Another example I can draw is the Flashman series of books. In his adventures, Flashy meets any number of famous 19th century figures and the hundreds of other people who were there who anybody but a history professor has forgotten about or had no idea even existed. TOS was way better at throwing in random names from the intervening centuries who were historical references for Kirk and co. And they could have done more of this in TNG era shows. But it doesn’t mean that 24th century folk revering Kirk is invalid.
Why wouldn't they? They had the same kind of missions, presumably. One ship couldn't patrol the entire frontier. I had a thought a few years back. As mentioned above, Roddenberry's preface to the TMP novelization used the conceit that Star Trek was a 23rd-century dramatic recreation of Kirk's adventures. Now, Roddenberry got his start in TV by writing up real police cases for Dragnet to dramatize, so he was probably thinking of ST as the same sort of thing, a dramatic re-enactment of official reports, framed by the lead character narrating those reports to the audience. But Dragnet dramatized many different officers' cases and gave them all to Joe Friday. So what if all the adventures we saw Kirk and the Enterprise having in the "dramatic re-enactment" were actually the missions of a bunch of different starships, all given to the same fictionalized crew? That would account for the implausibility of a single ship having so many adventures so close together. That would make it sort of an amalgam of Dragnet and Desilu's The Untouchables. The original Desilu Playhouse adaptation of the Untouchables book was supposedly based on the true adventures of Eliot Ness and his men (although it later came out that that book was largely fictionalized by Ness's coauthor), but when they spun it off into an ongoing series, they had to invent a bunch of totally imaginary adventures for the Untouchables, since they'd already used up the real ones. Note: I'm not proposing this was "actually" the case, of course. It's just an entertaining idea to play around with. Once again, I never said Kirk couldn't really be famous. I'm just not convinced we can assume he's the only one who's famous.
Whereas I know people who came to see such a relationship as incredibly toxic and wrong in retrospect, and that left them with issues they still deal with today.
There are "toxic" and "wrong" relationships where both partners are of the same age or close enough. Obviously, there is more to what constitutes unhealthy interpersonal dynamics than age alone.
My comment was in regards to the 32nd-Century and who is currently the big deal there Spoiler: in the future... Burnham's arrival likely is seen as the end of the post-Burn Dark Times across the Galaxy and the start of the comeback of both the Federation and the Starfleet. One of many exaggerations about Kirk.
It's from Roddenberry's TMP novelization, which Roddenberry himself later disowned and declared non canon, so there goes that idea.