It's an honour to be sitting in the captain's chair,
and an honour to be a part of a new chapter in the Star Trek saga
that takes us to where it all began.
Now, I can't run a ship like this all by myself, so l--
We're out of time?
Oh, well, I was gonna introduce you to--
Just kidding.
--the crew of the Enterprise.
My chief engineer, Commander Charlie Tucker,
will be played by Connor Trinneer.
My tactical officer, Lieutenant Malcolm Reed,
will be played by Dominic Keating.
Greetings, Earth.
Helmsman Ensign Travis Mayweather
will be played by Anthony Montgomery.
Smile.
Science officer, Sub-commander T'Pol,
- Hello. - will be played by Jolene Blalock.
My communications officer,
Ensign Hoshi Sato, will be played by Linda Park.
And, oh, here comes our good ship's doctor, Dr. Phlox,
played by John Billingsley.
We didn't wanna give away everything today.
Enterprise is a very special project,
and we are all very excited to be here.
This crew is--
Well, we are gonna make some history.
But in order to do that, we probably should get back to work, right, boss?
So thank you, and we'll see you out there.
Today, we are about to cross a new threshold.
For nearly a century, we've waded ankle-deep
in the ocean of space.
Now it's finally time to swim.
To me,
the wisest direction to go was in the area of a prequel.
I thought that we needed to find something
that got back closer to the beginning
of what this whole franchise was about.
The people running the TV division at the time
had a lot of reservations about doing a prequel.
They-- Some people wanted a show set in the 24th century.
But our feeling was,
everybody knew what happened at the time of the Eugenics Wars,
people knew what happened at the time of Zefram Cochrane.
And they knew that that all happened in the 22nd century.
And then they knew that in the 23rd century, there existed Starfleet,
there existed warp 5 spacecraft with Captain Kirk
and United Federation of Planets and Starfleet Academy.
And all of that existed in the very first episode
of the original Star Trek series.
So my thought was,
"What happened before that?
Where was The Right Stuff of Starfleet?
Where were the Chuck Yeagers of Starfleet?
Where were the people who truly made the first flights out into space?"
The helpful thing was that we could draw upon a lot of Star Trek lore,
30 years of Star Trek lore,
35 years of Star Trek lore,
and create story lines revolving around even the smallest kernel.
That was great. Still is.
On this site, a powerful engine will be built.
An engine that will someday help us to travel
100 times faster than we can today.
Imagine it. Thousands of inhabited planets at our fingertips.
And we'll be able to explore those strange new worlds.
And seek out new life and new civilisations.
This engine will let us go boldly
where no man has gone before.
It's always important to us
to keep the chronology of Star Trek accurate, as much as we can.
There's very, very little known about what happened prior to Captain Kirk.
So we're sort of making it up as we go along.
But I think it's very important that we stay true
to the development of a variety of things.
The Enterprise is only
a hundred years from our present reality
and slightly after the turn of our 2000 century.
So now, in the 21st century,
we are still able to see video screens as video screens.
We don't have to hide them behind walls.
And things are not so slick. Things don't always work.
And yet we have to show the beginnings
of things like the transporter,
the phaser pistol, the communicator,
the medical tricorder, all the things
that you really take for granted as part of the Star Trek world.
The key is, is that whatever we do has to be justified.
We have to do things that are in keeping with what the franchise
and the various series have been about.
And we can't invent stage B before stage A has been invented,
which is something that we're always very careful about monitoring.
We've created this universe, and now we go back to its roots
and have to stumble along
in finding ways to show how those things that we take for granted
in the other series might have begun.
Uhura had an earpiece, so Hoshi has an earpiece.
Spock had a viewer that he looked at,
so T'Pol, the science officer on the Enterprise, has a similar viewer.
So we're making things that connect backwards, if you will.
I heard this platform's been approved for bio-transport.
I presume you mean fruits and vegetables.
I mean armoury officers and helmsmen.
I don't think I'm ready to have my molecules
compressed into a data stream.
They claim it's safe.
Do they indeed?
If you look around the bridge, you'll see
that the controls are more tactile, mechanical.
The buttons are-- You have to push them.
I mean, they're not all touch screens.
It's a much more physical show.
It's rooted more in the mechanical and less in the esoteric, if you will.
It's a little more familiar.
Still future, but a little more familiar to our minds.
Course laid in, sir.
Request permission to get under way.
The coordinates are off by.2 degrees.
Thank you.
Let's go.
This is a challenge, and because it's a challenge,
it's a hell of a lot more fun to start with a blank sheet of paper.
In this case, and in the case of Deep Space Nine,
we had three empty stages and a blank sheet of paper.
So we're really literally building the entire idea of the series,
and the physical plant that the series is gonna be filmed in, from scratch.
Using some of the same old lines, but smoothing them out,
adding more technology, making them nostalgic in a way.
So, what our problem has been is to create that interim feeling
of being before the Enterprise from Star Trek: The Motion Picture
and still making it look new, retro and cool.
God, she's beautiful.
And fast.
I would say Enterprise, first of all, is physically smaller.
The ship is smaller.
You have to duck your head sometimes.
The corridors are narrower.
The consoles are closer together.
It's a physically smaller ship in space.
So much like a nuclear submarine, every square inch is used,
in the case of Enterprise,
every single square inch has to be used. There's no waste.
We don't have the luxury of a gigantic ocean-liner-type ship,
Iike Voyager and The Next Generation's Enterprise was.
So Enterprise is a smaller ship.
There's no onboard computer that does everything for you
the way it does in many of the other Star Trek venues.
We have a lot of things we have to figure out ourselves.
We have to do some calculations
and make jerry-rigged things do,
because we're out millions of miles from Earth
and we don't have any other support other than the ship.
Captain.
There's no way you could have anticipated this.
I'm sure Ambassador Soval will understand.
You're the science officer.
Why don't you help Trip with that analysis.
The astrometric computer in San Francisco
will be far more effective.
We're not going to San Francisco, so make do with what we've got here.
What's important about Enterprise is it's a ship of exploration.
And space travel,
interplanetary space travel,
is a fairly new thing in this era that we're entering now.
So the ships are designed to be ships of exploration,
much like Captain Kirk's ship was a ship of exploration.
It's designed to venture across space,
and mankind is learning about other cultures,
other spacefaring societies.
We're learning what it is to be a spacefaring nation.
And that's the time frame we're in.
It's a time of discovery of who we really are,
where we fit in into the cosmos.
Making a television series such as Star Trek is an enterprise,
no pun intended,
that doesn't happen just because there's a production designer.
There's a production designer, an art director,
there's a set decorator, there's a construction coordinator,
there's a paint foreman,
there's literally a thousand people
that have put 150 percent
of their effort into making this a reality.
I myself am very thankful that we have a top-notch crew
of people here in Hollywood that really know their business.
So it requires an army of talented,
dedicated and generous people.
Generous with their time, generous with their ideas,
and Paramount, of course, generous with their money.
I hope nobody is in a big hurry to get home.
Starfleet seems to think that we're ready to begin our mission.
I understand there's an inhabited planet a few light-years from here.
I've detected it, sir.
Sensors show a nitrogen-sulphide atmosphere.
Probably not humanoids.
That's what we're here to find out.
Prepare to break orbit and lay in a course.
I'm reading an ion storm on that trajectory, sir.
Should I go around it?
We can't be afraid of the wind, ensign.
Take us to warp 4.