By Jon Lomberg

A remembrance of things past, inspired by the new Star Trek movie.

I wasn’t a fan of Star Trek when it first came out. The cheesy effects and cheesier writing of many episodes of the original series did not whet my appetite for more.

When I began to show my art at Sci-Fi conventions, I couldn’t help but absorb some of the Trekkies’ excitement, and eventually started watching the show in reruns. But it was a guilty pleasure.

I was working Carl Sagan, who was contemptuous of Star Trek. Bad stories and bad science did not represent the space program in a very positive light.

I met Star Trek’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1976, on the night Viking 1 landed on the surface of Mars. I was there making a documentary about it for CBC radio. Roddenberry and actress Nichelle Nichols (who plays communications officer Lieutenant Uhura) were in attendance, along with writers Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury, among other Sci-Fi luminaries.

Not yet 30, I was brash enough to alienate Roddenberry by suggesting most Star Trek fans of my acquaintance were less interested in the real space program and more in trivia from the show, like the name of Capt. Kirk’s brother.

Roddenberry bristled and defended his fans as believers in the space program.

(My assertion stands 30 plus years later, based on the 2009 movie, which is completely character driven and self-referential. The film is really not about space at all —there’s no exploration, no interesting aliens, no sense of wonder. It’s not about anything but Star Trek.)

In 1978 I was in Hollywood working on animation for Sagan’s TV series COSMOS when the first Star Trek: The Movie was in production.

I worried a big budget movie would make our sequences look mediocre by comparison. Then we started hearing horror stories about the sad fate of SFX creator Robert Abel, who lost his shirt and his company when the effects for the movie ran into trouble. There were lots of problems with that movie, including weak depictions of space itself, but the film’s most redeeming quality was its incorporation of the message aboard an imaginary Voyager 6 into the plot. It closed the circle of real and imagined space exploration in a way that I found very satisfying, having worked on the real Voyager Record myself.

When Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TNG) came to TV, it won my heart. Everything was better.

The stories, the acting, the imaginary technology, even the uniforms. And space itself looked good — finally. A lot of the credit goes to my COSMOS colleague Rick Sternbach who, along with Michael Okuda, acted as art and technical advisors.

Besides designing the look of all the spacescapes and technology, their role went something like this: a writer would call and say “We need something to go wrong with the engine.” Rick and Mike would come up with a problem, for example: “tachyon pollution of the dilithium crystals”. They’d also devise a solution: “reverse the polarity of the anti-matter flow” (reversing the polarity being the all-purpose fix in Treknology)

In 1989, my wife and I were at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the Voyager spacecraft’s encounter with Neptune. Rick invited us to Paramount Studios to visit the ST:TNG set. We toured the bridge, sat in 10 Forward, and learned some backstage secrets. For example, budget determined whether the Enterprise used warp drive or stayed at impulse power: impulse drive only required stagehands to slowly roll a painted starfield past the viewports; warp effects required more expensive blue-screen compositing. If an episode was going over budget, they had to drop out of warp and make do with impulse.

Best of all, ST:TNG presented a positive view of the future.

We have always been much better imagining hell than heaven.

For the most part Sci-Fi films deal with horrors of the future – killer computers, homicidal robots, devilish aliens, post-nuclear apocalypse. Exciting movies, but who wants to exist in any of those futures?

ST:TNG, on the other hand, presented a future that was positive in every respect, with humans who had solved all the problems that currently beset our world. Sagan finally agreed that the series was a positive contribution to public attitudes about space exploration. Roddenberry became an active supporter of The Planetary Society, the organisation Carl founded to demonstrate public support for NASA science programs.

The Star Trek franchise developed more TV and film projects and formed a strong bond with NASA. The Star Trek universe became a common reference point for science fiction fans and space science buffs. Even the “science” of Star Trek could be used to sweeten the teaching of real physics.

In this sense, the new movie, enjoyable and nostalgic to old fans (but perhaps incomprehensible to newer ones) represents a backward step. I couldn’t recognise any names in the credits of the Paramount crew that had shaped Roddenberry canonic universe. Even the technology seemed all wrong. ST:TNG’s solid-state engine room, was replaced with what seemed like a petrochemical facility, with miles of piping, valves, and sloshing liquids labeled “reactant” (and shouldn’t that be “reagent”?) It just did not feel right, even allowing for the fact that it was a century earlier than Geordie LaForge’s spotless engine room.

Since this movie seems to have opened the possibility of subsequent adventures of Kirk’s crew, we can only hope ensuing films will return to the trajectory of boldly going someplace other than to a battle.

My own connection with the Star Trek universe is now on Mars, part of the Planetary Society’s Visions of Mars DVD carried aboard NASA’s Phoenix lander, presently somewhere in that cold desolation of sand, rock, and (yay!) ice. This disk is a gift to the future human inhabitants of Mars. It represents the important symbiosis between Sci-Fi and real space science. It reminds those who live on Mars that it took the dreams of visionaries to have gotten there.

As Director of this project, it seemed important to me that Star Trek be part of the package — and it is. There is an image of the (never seen in close-up) plaque on the bridge of ST:TNG’s Enterprise, stating that the Enterprise was built in the Utopia Planitia shipyards on Mars. A section of the disk containing Orson Welles’ ‘War of the Worlds’ radio broadcast is introduced by the voice of Patrick Stewart, the actor who played Captain Picard. Also in that section is part of that CBC radio documentary I did in 1976, including the voice Roddenberry who says: “The real space program provides the science, we supply the dreams that keep people interested.”

Amen to that. Let’s hope future Star Trek vehicles return to that mission.

Read Jon’s first 10 days posting here: Astronomical art: Representing Planet Earth.

Jon is one of the guests at Ultimo Science Festival’s ‘Big Night of Science’ on August 21.

www.jonlomberg.com
www.galaxygarden.net

Tags: Sagan, Star Trek

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