Part I : The Origins of Where No Man has Gone Before and Other Star Trek Staples

Photo by : Joanna Poe

Where No Man has Gone Before

Samuel Peeples wrote the second pilot episode of the same name, and David Alexanders' autobiography of Gene Roddenberry attributes the phrase to the Peeples.  But the iconic opening dates back much further.  James Cook made a version of the declaration as he explored North America, according to BBC.com.  The explorer intended not only to go, “farther than any man has been before me, but as far as I think it is possible for a man to go"

Closer to the time in question, though, An Introduction to Outer Space was a White House document that was issued to help calm the nation around the Sputnik launching, according to Dwayne A. Day of the Space Review.

“…the compelling urge of man to explore and to discover, the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before,” boasts the 1958 brochure. 

Day goes onto say that Roddenberry did his research and acquainted himself with the nearby aerospace community.  So it’s not a stretch to speculate that Star Trek’s creator came across the document and infused into his show. 

So after the first episodes were filmed, but before airing, the introduction evolved through the revisions of Roddenberry, John Blake and Robert Justman.

Pretty damn bold.

Warp Speed

My early look at Star Trek and warp speed mostly had me in the dark. I initially knew the exploration utilized FTL travel, but later on, I simply used cognitive dissonance to explain what science taught me. No particle in the universe could travel faster than light. Moving forward, TNG took more time to explain the future’s locomotion, and I gladly accepted the theory of warping space.  So not too long ago, I figured Roddenberry must have envisioned the possibility by studying up on Einstein or some other renowned physicist.

I was wrong.

The theory of light speed travel originated with one John W. Campbell, and he had it going on from both sides of his brain. Campbell earned a B.S. in Physics from Duke University, while beginning his life as a Sci Fi writer at age 18. His initial resolution to traveling faster than light involved super beings who could use their mental powers to warp space, according to the Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction.

But the author apparently reached back into his physics background to hypothesize a science based locomotion for his 1931 novel, Islands of Space. I’ll simply let the scientist who are currently studying the real possibility explain.  “If a spaceship could be designed in such a way that it created a warp bubble, then the space in front of the ship would be compressed and the space behind would expand. This would result in space-time moving around the object, repositioning the ship without it actually moving, says IFLScience.com

What was that? I'll take their word for it, and I wonder who's going to scientifically explain Discovey's propulsion system. I think we'll be awaiting a while for that one.

Ten-Forward

The Enterprise’s bar/dinning area - what a cool name. But we all wonder where the name comes from when a scene emerges. Of course, once the action resumes, the inkling for an answer quickly fades. So now that I have your attention, here it is. The crew lounge is located at the forward section of Deck 10.

See, you’re glad you know, and now we can get onto more important things.

NCC-1701

Where do the immortal call letters come from. One common belief is straight up.  NCC stands for Naval Construction Contract, but the tubular man on the inside clarifies.  

NC, by international agreement, stood for all United States commercial vehicles. Russia had wound up with four Cs, CC CC. It’d been pretty much a common opinion that any major effort in space would be two expensive for any one country, so I mixed the US and the Russian and came up with NCC.  The one seven zero part - I needed a number that would be instantly identifiable, and three, six, eight and nine are too easily confused. I don’t think anyone’ll confuse a one and a seven, or the zero. So the one seven stood for the seventeenth basic ship design in the Federation, and the zero one would have been serial number one, the first bird," Matt Jeffries told BBC, according to the reporting of neatorama.com

A, B,C,D or E - it sounds good to me.

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