Exploring the Overlap Between Star Trek and Reality
On September 8, 1966, Star Trek sent the Enterprise on its first televised voyage. Sixty years later, the show’s strangest legacy may be how often its fictional future wandered right into our real one. In fact, a 2025 survey found that 37% of Americans are fans of at least one iteration of Star Trek, from the OG to the most recent films and TV options. Looks like the final frontier is a popular destination!
Today’s Trivia Question
Which member of the original Star Trek cast later worked with NASA to recruit minority astronaut candidates?
Bonus points if you know which civil rights leader helped convince the cast member to remain on the show.
| A Few More for Fun… |
Though it was known to have set out on a “five-year mission to explore strange new worlds…,” the show Star Trek has spent six decades blurring the lines between imagined spaceflight and the real thing. Sometimes, reality even borrowed from the show. And NASA did more than just admire from a distance.
Television space travelers had already explored distant galaxies before Earthlings left footprints on their nearest neighbor. The amazing thing about Star Trek is just how often it beat us to the punch, predicting our future with surprising accuracy.
| A Few More Trivia Questions Before You Go… |
Sixty years of Star Trek gives us plenty of room to wander and explore other reaches. Our “weekend rabbit hole” is looking more like a wormhole, landing us in the middle of a Venn diagram where the Star Trek universe and our reality overlap. From communications and space flight to a Canadian town, let’s see just how often Star Trek got there first, and how far it wandered as it did.
In the 1990s, Motorola’s first version of which device drew design inspiration from the communicators on Star Trek?
Before Star Trek fans started reaching out with requests for naming rights, what did NASA originally plan to call its first space shuttle orbiter?
The town in Alberta, Canada, named Vulcan appeared on maps long before Mr. Spock’s home planet became a household name. Where did the town’s name actually come from?
Interestingly, another star-flavored movie has boosted tourism in another locale and overlaps with Star Trek in a unique way.
In the 1984 movie Starman, where does the alien played by Jeff Bridges race to meet the spacecraft that will take him home?
Fiction keeps bringing the Voyagers home, but in reality, they just keep going. Learn about them here: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-voyager-1-and-voyager-2-now/
Answers
Today’s question Answer: C. Nichelle Nichols. NASA enlisted Nichols, who played communications officer Lt. Uhura, for a nationwide recruiting campaign aimed at women and minorities. The astronaut class announced the following year was the very first NASA class to include women and minorities. Bonus points if you knew that it was Martin Luther King, Jr. who urged Nichols to stay on the show because of the importance of seeing a Black woman portrayed as an intelligent professional and an equal among her fellow crew members. She had thought of returning to musical theater at the end of the first season of the show. | |
| 01 | Answer: B. False. Enterprise was NASA’s first shuttle orbiter, but it was built for ground tests and test flights within Earth’s atmosphere. It helped prove that the space shuttle could glide back to a runway, but Enterprise never went into orbit. Of course, the timing of the original series did provide another unusual bit of overlap… |
| 02 | Answer: B. Six weeks. The original series concluded on June 3, 1969. Apollo 11 launched the following month, and humans first walked on the Moon on July 20. |
| 03 | Answer: B. The flip phone. Motorola’s first flip phone drew inspiration from the communicators Kirk and his crew used. Apparently, “beam me up” was not yet possible, so “call me back” had to do. |
| 04 | Answer: A. Constitution. NASA planned to unveil the vehicle on Constitution Day in 1976. But Star Trek fans intervened and launched their own write-in campaign asking for the vessel to be named Enterprise instead. President Gerald Ford backed the request. |
| 05 | Answer: D. The Roman god of fire. A surveyor for the Canadian Pacific Railway named the town Vulcan in 1913 (that’s more than half a century before Star Trek). When the TV series became popular, the townsfolk embraced the coincidence, began hosting an annual Star Trek convention, named a visitor center and museum Trek Station, and even built an Enterprise replica to draw tourists! |
| 06 | Answer: D. Meteor Crater, Arizona. The pickup is scheduled for Meteor Crater near Winslow, Arizona. The film used this nearly mile-wide impact site. But Starman shares a theme with Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Both films reference the Voyager probes. In Starman, the Golden Record (a real thing) contains an invitation to Earth, which the aliens accept and pay a visit. In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, an imagined Voyager 6 probe returns to Earth as the famous “V’Ger”. |
| 07 | Answer: B. Vulcan. Okrand was hired back in 1982 to create some Vulcan dialogue for a scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. He later created Klingon and developed it into a full, constructed language. He published The Klingon Dictionary in 1985. It’s complex enough to understand just why the Klingons have permanently wrinkled brows! |
How did you do? Score 1 point for each correct answer and 1 point for each bonus you knew. Perfect score: 10.
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