It’s a 50-year-old chunk of wood that doesn’t fly and can’t even stand up by itself. For a while it was considered garbage. Now it’s in the Smithsonian. I’m talking about the original large-scale model of the USS Enterprise from the original Star Trek. It’s been lovingly preserved as it originally appeared in the late second season of the show, and the whole thing’s been documented in this Vimeo video:
They really went to town here with computer modeling, color-matching, and from what it looks like, they only used actual techniques that existed in the 1960s. The result is undeniably authentic.
The model is in the Udvar-Hazy building in Washington along with a lot of really more significant actual flying machines, but as you see in the video it gets a lot of attention. That’s because a whole generation of scientists called Star Trek their inspiration, and although I’m no scientist, I did too.
