Emissaries of Peaceful Exploration

Voyager’s interstellar mission summons up the voice-over at the beginning of what began as a seemingly minor television series, initially aired between 1966 and 1969, titled Star Trek: “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Those words, immortalized by William Shatner in his role as Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise, have powerfully shaped popular discourse regarding space exploration. By the late 1960s, Americans were tuning their televisions to watch the space drama created by Gene Roddenberry and developed along with Herb Solow, Gene Coon, Matt Jeffries, and Bob Justman. The impact of Star Trek has been unprecedented and unparalleled. In decades of syndication, the se­ries would inspire and captivate a global audience. Film historian Constance Penley points out that in the cultural discourse Star Trek became inextricably linked with NASA. Describing the con­flation of NASA and the television series in its various iterations as a “powerful cultural icon,” Penley contends that “NASA/TREK shapes our popular and institutional imaginings about space ex­ploration.” By 1976, NASA and Star Trek were so intertwined in the popular thinking that, at the request of Star Trek fans, Presi­dent Gerald Ford was persuaded to change the name of the newly unveiled prototype space shuttle from Constitution to Enterprise. Penley writes, “Many of the show’s cast members were there as the Enterprise. . . was rolled out onto the tarmac at the Edwards Air Force Base to the stirring sounds of Alexander Courage’s theme from Star Trek.”53 Then JPL Director Bruce Murray recalls that a year later, in 1977 when the Voyager spacecraft were launched, funding for the planned Jupiter Orbiter with Probe (JOP) project had been cancelled. That summer, Gene Roddenberry happened to be speaking at a Star Trek convention in Philadelphia and encour­aged the five thousand attendees to contact their congressional representatives to save the mission.54 Whatever the reason was for the reversal, the Jupiter mission eventually was supported as the Galileo Orbiter.

That Star Trek touched a powerful chord in the public sphere is unquestioned. William Shatner has observed that the original Star Trek series went on to become the most successful television series ever produced, and has evolved into a huge industry comprising spun-off TV series, motion pictures including J. J. Abrams’s Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), as well as novels, cartoons, action figures, Trek conventions, and many marketing products.55 By aligning the space agency with the Star Trek fran­chise, NASA has realized even greater public interest. In 2011, the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) attracted visitors with “Summer of Sci Fi: Where Science Fiction Meets Science Fact.” The event was designed to combine “the technology, innovation and exploration of NASA with the adventures of Star Trek.” Its website featured a retro image of Spock, modeled on the 1960s series, with his hand raised in the Vulcan greeting of “Live long and prosper.”56 Activi­ties included a live theater production that posed the audience as new recruits for Starfleet Command, a shuttlecraft simulator, “Star Trek: The Exhibition,” and an opportunity to win a suborbital flight with XCOR Aerospace, whose Lynx aircraft is to be piloted by former astronaut Rick Searfoss.

The Voyager mission was even featured as a plot device in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) when Kirk reunites with his for­mer crew to save the Earth from a sentient spacecraft that eradicates everything in its path as it searches for its creator. Unfortunately for Kirk and his crew, the entity views them as a carbon-based infestation of starships. It gains sentience after unknown aliens re­pair the old Earth spacecraft that forms its core, the name of which is V’Ger, a corruption of the word Voyager and likely derived from the acronyms given the Voyager spacecraft. A test model of Voy­ager was labeled VGR77-1, while the spacecraft actually launched were titled VGR77-2 and VGR77-3.57 On a recent NPR Science Friday program, Ira Flatow asked Ed Stone about his reaction to the film, to which Stone replied: “I thought it was a really won­derful idea to take this spacecraft and somehow make it part of a sentient being. Of course, that’s science fiction, but it really does illustrate the impact Voyager’s had on [the] public imagination.”58

The popular conflation of NASA and Star Trek produced a deep cultural narrative about the possibilities of exploring the universe through international and peaceful collaboration. Roddenberry’s altruistic vision of human civilization four hundred years in the future is evidenced in the name chosen for his fictional starship. In deliberate counterpoint to the first nuclear-powered aircraft car­rier, the U. S.S. Enterprise, Roddenberry christened his vessel the United Starship Enterprise and assigned its crew a mission for the peaceful exploration of space.59 Currently, Richard Branson’s Vir­gin Spaceship Enterprise, or VSS Enterprise, is poised to be among the first to offer commercial space tourism flights and is so named in recognition of Star Trek.

There’s a lesson to be gleaned from the history of a low-budget television series, which was cancelled after its third season, that nevertheless has produced such an enduring vision for hu­mankind’s peaceful future. Jon Wagner and Jan Lundeen assert, “Myths are a people’s deep stories—the narratives that structure their worldview.” They point out that Star Trek and its spin-off series frequently drew upon ancient myths to rework them into a modern mythos about equality, regardless of ethnicity or species, and of a future time when humankind organized into a “Federa­tion of Planets has eliminated intolerance, exploitation, greed, war, and materialism.”60 Penley likewise claims that “an astonishingly complex popular discourse about civic, social, moral, and political issues is filtered through the idiom and ideas of Star Trek” and this, in part, explains why the series has been such “a hugely popular story of things to come.”61

In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan wrote: “The visions we offer our chil­dren shape the future. It matters what those visions are.” Cultural narratives, even those spun from fiction, can powerfully shape a generation and a culture’s vision for survival in ages long hence. Among the deeply resonant narratives of space exploration in­forming our generation is Voyager’s epic journey, and Sagan’s apt commentary on the spacecraft’s view of Earth from the edge of our Solar System. “Look again at that dot,” he admonished. “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. . . . There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. . . . To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”62