‘Star Trek’ and NASA have intertwined legacies – the show championed diversity and inspired generations of real space scientists

Filed 23h ago · Via The Conversation · The Buffoon Desk

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Virtutes Instrumenti

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Julien Chatelain from Paris, France · CC BY-SA 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A cultural anthropologist marks Star Trek's 60th anniversary by tracing its long, documented ties to NASA, from Leonard Nimoy's 1967 appearance at a National Space Club dinner to the naming of the first space shuttle Enterprise. Nichelle Nichols was hired by NASA in 1977 to recruit for the astronaut corps, and 1978 brought NASA's first Black and female astronaut candidates.

The piece notes that a quarter of space professionals the researcher interviewed cited Star Trek as an influence, and that recent NASA milestones, including the 2025 astronaut class and the Artemis II crew, echoed the show's inclusive vision.

It closes by noting the Trump administration's orders to dismantle NASA's diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs, which the piece says are undoing institutional support for that vision just as NASA reached those milestones.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

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Sixty years of a fictional crew mixed a Russian, a Vulcan, a Black communications officer and an American captain and called it the future, and NASA spent decades trying to actually build toward it. Tearing down the programs meant to keep that door open, right as the real astronaut corps started looking like the show finally predicted, is a strange kind of timing. You'd think an agency that named a shuttle after the thing would remember why it did.

Source: Read the original at The Conversation → Scored: Virtutes Instrumenti · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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