The Original Star Trek USS Enterprise Filming Model!

Hey everybody, Adam Savage and I am not in my cave. I am in fact in the conservation lab at the Smithsonian, one of my favorite places on earth. And last time I was here at the museum we got to cover an x-wing on the floor. This time it is the Starship Enterprise, from a dystopian to a utopia. And to walk me through this incredible model, and there's, we're not going to be able to fit all that we want to talk about into this video, is Dr. Margaret Whitey Camp. Hi Adam. Hello Margaret, it's good to see you. Nice to see you again. This is insane seeing this up close. This is the original Enterprise. So this is the original Enterprise. This is 11 feet long. It is the object that was used to make those iconic shots in the opening of every episode and at the beginning of every plot line where they would come to orbit around the planet. And that was this model shot on a soundstage. There is, I have so many questions about this model. Having been a model maker, having seen many of the next generation and further Enterprises. Yes. I'm astounded by the paint job of this. But let's talk about how long this has been with the museum and the process that it's gone through. So this was originally designed in 1964. It was built and the first shooting was done in 65-66. Of course the series begins in 1966 and runs to 69. So we have original paint, as you said, on the top of this, which is just a treasure to get to have. So, you know, we have actually, you know, the pencil lines on here that were originally drawn. And I just think it is amazing to me how much something that was really built just to get those shots has held together for more than 50 years. It's just solidly built, mostly wood. People always think it must be kind of some futuristic or it was a plastic. It was simplest to, there's some vacuform plastic, but large parts, the, you know, engineering hall here is basically a wood barrel. I have to say, so many people have made replicas of this ship over the years. Companies will sell them that you can purchase, but there's always seems to be about the size limit of 24 inches because past that all the models people have tried to sell start to droop over time. And the fact that all the planes of this are perfect. Yes. Over 50 years later is incredible to me. It's a beautiful balancing job. The fronts of the nacelles are a little more solid than the backs of the nacelles are. And that, and we've got a, basically it does create a balance across the whole ship where it really holds itself together because the point of the design is it's supposed to look like it wouldn't exist well in 1G. Right, right. It's supposed to look like it has to be in space. Almost right. Oh, that's brilliant. Now it got restored a few years ago by some friends of mine. Yes, indeed. We were able to bring in folks formerly from ILM and currently at ILM. So the funny story on that is I'm the curator for the space science fiction objects. And I went to essentially with my budget to the director and said, I want to bring these experts in who come from Hollywood who know more than I do about this. And he really looked at me in the eye and said, like, what am I paying you for? And I'm like, to know the right people. Right, right. To call the right people and get them in the room. So we had Mike and Denise Okuda who have written the Star Trek encyclopedia. We had John Goodson, who's now working on things like the Mandalorian. Yep. Kim Smith, who is a wonderful detail painter, Bill George. One of the best painters I have ever met. Who was absolutely brilliant at this. Gary Kerr, who became our oracle, our guru of this. We had people like Adam Schneider, who has collected these and who led the restoration on the Galileo, the full scale shuttlecraft from the original series. So we were really able to bring that group together. Andrew Probert, who had worked on this and who developed the DeLorean for Back to the Future, as well as he designed the Enterprise D, Rick Sternbach from Paramount. And get them to come in and just do soup to nuts like nacelle end caps, the lighting effects, the windows, the paint, the decals. What do we want to do with each of the things and really kind of run it through. We had two days in person in 2015 to really come up with a plan. And then it took about another year's worth of work to really execute all of the pieces. Amazing. Now you said that, of course, it's built to look like it wouldn't do well in 1G. Yes. It's also, in contrast to the ships from Star Wars, it does not have a variegated finish with all sorts of weathering on it. And we think of the paint job as being monolithic, like it's a color. But looking close up at the saucer, I'm astounded at all the green and the brown and the, again, the variance of color here is way more variegated than I would have thought it would be. Yes. And it really, I think on your glowy little cathode ray tube, your childhood memory of having watched the original series, you think of it as kind of a gray white. And when you get to the model itself, we know that this is original. It fluoresces differently than the paints that have been put on later. And that's where I get to, you know, the team here is amazing. The conservators, the science that they are able to bring to this really helps us. So looking at it with UV lights, it looks different. But I just think, yeah, there's a wonderful amount of detail that had been added to this that gives it that sense of weight. And scale. And scale. And that original design that you get from Matt Jeffries, where he was thinking about, he wasn't just going to create a pointy rocket or a kind of undifferentiated flying saucer. This has parts that look like they would do something. And therefore, they kind of convey a sense of reality and weight to it. And I think, you know, pretty much every ship designed after that had to rise to that level. He just brought the whole enterprise up. It really is a special marker in that virtuous cycle of science fiction and prognostication and what the future might hold. Before we get too much more deep in this, a friend of mine has come here and wants to ask some questions as well. So I'd like to bring in astronaut Katie Coleman. Oh, I'd be delighted. I know you were excited. I know you were excited to see this up close. And we're looking at the wrong side, right? We are. We're on kind of the business side of this. So the port side of this never would have faced camera. And so you can see that they had the wires and things running into it. And in some ways, you know, I've talked about this and I've written about this as it's kind of a real-life movie star, a real-life television star. And that it has a good side. And a kind of like ready for camera side and a, you know, all of the wiring and what you need to do to get everything to work. And at the time, they really would, you know, we're replicating a little bit because we have it off display. When it was on a shooting stage, they wouldn't have worried about making that neat because they knew it was all going to be dropped out. And the way that they were going to be compositing those shots to put the star fields in behind it. So the other side of it. So the starboard side is really the kind of camera ready side. Yeah. Let's see that. All right. Come around this way. And you can really, I think, see the difference. All of the windows that are in, that are essential, are translucent. And these all light. Those all light. Wow. Oh really? Yes. Yeah. There's lights within it. There's no original electronics in this. It was unfortunately stripped out by the museum in 1974 when this came from Paramount. Paramount had purchased Desilu. That was in some ways the end of the show in 69. They sold Desilu in 1968. Desilu. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz's was the original production company for Star Trek. They're totally responsible for Star Trek. Lucille Ball. Greenlit Star Trek. Those two are so important to the history of television and it's only just becoming part of understood history. Yes. That's awesome. So the studio didn't have a need for an 11 foot 200 pound model of a spaceship that they were not going to film again. And so there was a nice connection between Gene Roddenberry and Fred Durant, who was head of the Department of Astronautics here at the museum. And they were building this new building on the National Mall for the museum and wanted a real showstopper piece for an exhibit called Life in the Universe? And this is a wonderful kind of current events at the time example of how one might imagine what it would look like to be a spacefaring species. How come it's like almost dirt? Like, you know, reddish brown. I'm like, really? I thought it never got dirty up there. Yeah. There's a lot more weathering to this. One of the things that we really did in 2014-2015 is go back to as many photos as we could get of this. And we had much more that we were working with than what they had when they were doing things in 2000. In 1999-2001, that was the last time it had been worked on. And we really were able to, you know, window by window, piece by piece, go through and take a look at all of the details. And a lot of that, as I say, if you're watching the show, kind of fades out anymore. If you're watching it, you're probably seeing a CGI that's been dropped in because they weren't able to. I thought it was real. Okay. But there's also this thing of that it looks to us like weathering, but on camera, that sort of just becomes a slight detail that pops. Yes. So there's, it's about painting. It's not meant to look weathered. It's not meant to look like. I do think it's meant to look a little bit more. The Star Trek universe is a little shinier than the Star Wars lived in gritty. It's been knotted into universe. But there is still, if something is completely flat, it won't read right on screen. Yeah. If it's one color, all sorts of detail starts to drop off. And so you add these little, like all this green streaking is stuff that would just add some scale to that saucer when you saw it move to the camera. So there's this whole way in which when I'm painting stuff, sometimes I'll actually pull out my camera and look at it so I can see what the camera sees. And I'll say, oh, you know what? I need to pull this detail out a little more and make it drop back a little bit. So, and up close, it often looks like, wow, it looks a little crunchier than I would have expected. But on camera, it's just, your eye just builds the detail. But I was going to say to me, just seeing the ship, I mean, it's one thing that, I mean, most of the scenes take place inside or on a planet or whatever, but it always seems fantastical that people could actually leave our planet and go somewhere else. And when you see that at the beginning of the show, I mean, you know that this is really something that could happen, right? At least I believed it, and then it was so. Yes. And it was so both in reality and for you. You left the planet. But I think people need to have that sort of visceral understanding that it's not just a make, you can't just be somewhere else. You have to get there. Right. Right. And I think the depiction of the cast also was absolutely barrier-breaking to have a cast of men and women of different races in 1966, which is really still in the middle of the women's movement, the middle of the civil rights movement, to have an Asian-American helmsman, to have Michelle Nichols as an African-American woman who was the communications officer, to have a Russian, you know, Pavel Chekhov added in the second season, you know, suggests that we can all come together and go into space and do these things. Well, and even so many kids, you know, see themselves in one of those people, and not even just in what they look like, but how they act and what kinds of decisions and the way they make decisions and realize it's not just one sort of space-like person. Yes. Yes. When the organization was rarely the plot point, right? Like the whole subtext of Star Trek is we worked out our social problems, and now we can apply ourselves to bigger problems. Right. Now we can do other things and explore. I'm curious about the fronts of the nacelles. So those aren't the original domes? No, those are not the original domes. They're beautiful. Yes, they are. The original domes are long since lost. They broke when they were shipped in 1974, and the museum did not hold on to them and replaced them, in fact, with these rather opaque caps that were a bright kind of red, almost matching some of the stripes on the side here. And people really didn't like them. They wrote to the museum and said, that is not what this looked like. And Fred Durant would write back and say, Gene Roddenberry said it was okay. You know, that's what we picked. But one of the stories that I really love is that John Goodson, a dear friend of yours and a great friend of the museum's, I believe saw this enterprise with those end caps when he was a child and he came to the museum and hated it. Like, knew, like, this is not right. And the whole time he was building us the lighting effect, which has a kind of double dome that spins that allows us to get inside. Yeah. He kept saying, like, I can't believe I'm the one who's going to fix it. Since he was a kid. And then he was in the right place to be able to be the one to fix it for us. So, and it was also, it hung for years at the museum and it was really built to be on a stand. Oh, so did the hanging of it distort it in any way? The hanging of it was not great for the wood. We were seeing some stress. And so one of the decisions made was to put it on a stand. You can place it. There's a spot where there's a hole and you can put a stand in and it kind of runs up through the engineering hall, up through this dorsal, almost to the top of that. And you can sit it on one point. Wow. And it will balance. We don't because it makes the curator nervous. Do you think they do it when you're not looking? We keep it, so we keep it well supported because, you know, I worry about vibrations, things like that. We're always thinking about light levels, about, you know, both what are the stories that we can tell by putting this out, but also then how are we preserving this for generations to come so that, you know, we're doing the best by it and the most documentation that we can of everything that we have done to and with the model so that if it needs to be reversed at some point, someone can. So I'm looking also at some of these really beautiful, subtle little streaks and I see some dark and some brown and even a little green. Now, you didn't just come up with a map for how that would work and Kim just painted it, did you? We were looking at original photos and then they also built a kind of mock-up of the engineering hole in the dorsal and did a variety of tests on that and then tests also just on pieces that we had painted with the base color. So there was a whole process. And then we were taking those to the windows to see them under natural light. We were looking in here, which is kind of color corrected light, and so really thinking about, you know, one spray, two sprays, you know, you don't want to experiment on the piece itself. You want to have a really clear plan of what you're going to do by the time you're actually doing it. Was there any like, oh no? We had a moment when we were looking at the contrast between the base color, which we had worked out almost chemically and knew exactly what it was going to be, and the way that the details were showing up against it and then the way that you needed to put the light on it, and making sure that all of those things matched what we wanted the overall appearance to be and matched what we wanted, how we wanted to be able to match it against the actual colors. And I will say I called a stop and we went and sat in a conference room for like an hour and dug through the whole thing, which is not what you do in Hollywood, and made like all of the Hollywood, like schedule is everything. And so that was one of the moments where they were realizing the Smithsonian works differently because I called a stop to the whole thing and we all sat down and worked until everybody around the table was completely happy with where we were going to go next. Wow. And then we started working again because we want to get it right. It's not about schedule and just about getting the shot. It's about making sure we're making the right decisions for posterity. Now these holes around here, I see LED lights in there. Yes. Tell me what's going on with the lighting. So there's lighting that is inside of the engineering hall. There's lighting that's inside. Oh, I didn't even, I didn't even. Yes. Oh, look at that. Oh, that's that. Oh my goodness. That's when you can see the people. Like you can imagine when you were talking about lights, I was like, well, I guess that that did have lights. But when you see it like that, you realize it just makes you think there were definitely people in there. Yes. Right. Yeah. No, it's a wonderful effect. It's bits of flex that have been pounded into the wood. So if you look on the, if they're rough on the inside. Yeah. Oh my gosh. They really are pounded into the wood. Watch how close your head is getting. I get a lot of complaints from the channel that I wave my hands too much around delicate things. Is that how the Nike or t-shirt got stretched out? Probably. Exactly. Yeah. So they took the original electronics out in 1974. And so that has allowed the museum to now, we're upgrading, we are relamping even from what we did in 2015 because we can do things with better color control. We can do things with less temperature. Right. And really it's built. I will say when we were doing the 2015 restoration, I was adamant that I really didn't want the inside messed with. And folks on the expert team were on the advisory committee were saying like, no, it's really, you've got to light it. It's really, really beautiful. And one of our conservators did essentially what you just did. She put the flashlight on, on her phone and she stuck her whole arm up into the engineering hall and all of those windows lit up. And I gasped. I absolutely, and it was so beautiful. And you, Micah Kuda was like, she's changing her mind. We've got her. And it's absolutely, it becomes the character, right? So I think this is, you know, in some ways a real television star. It is the body that creates this. But then when you get the lighting, I will say one of the things that I have written about, because I started as a women's historian, is that people who are writing to the museum, who are unhappy with how the model is being treated, tend to say she. They mean the enterprise. They mean the character. And they had, she is not being well cared for as opposed to it's the model. And we, when we had that moment, when we finally finished and lit it up, one of the things I noticed is everybody in the room suddenly said, oh, she's beautiful. Right. And the pronouns changed and they didn't even think about it. It became a personality. It became the character of the enterprise. Okay. So. Kind of like a mother and a home. Yeah. I see that she's also been to the doctor and gotten some x-rays. This is one of the nacelles. Yes. X-rayed full size. Yes. So that is one of the tools that we've been, we're able to use. Nails. Yep. It has penny nails into the wood. And you can just see how the tubing was created. You can see what the fans were at the time that were kind of turning everything around. But we were able to bring in a portable x-ray machine that is actually with our sister institution, the National Zoo. Really? So the same x-rays that are used for the panda, we use it on the enterprise and got a good look at the inside of the saucer section. We're able to put some composites together of the nacelles. It was a really valuable thing to be able to get a good sense of what we were looking at structure-wise without having to do anything that would pull it apart in ways that you don't want to. I'll bet John and the other modelers were really pleased to be able to see the internal structure. It really, really helped. And then we had big television screens where we were throwing pictures up and we could put compilations of pictures up next to each other to make choices. We had, you know, we had blown our plans up very, very large and we had those on posters so that we could have lots of reference points. Now we also have, there's, I want to talk about what's in these boxes. Okay. Can I pull one closer or shall we bring the... I'll slide the box. There we go. You slide the box. You've got him scared now. So tell me what's going on here. This is beautiful. So this is what we now are using on the fronts of the nacelles and it's basically, it becomes a two-part piece where you've got the interior dome has this kind of striping and then the light effect, which is very similar to what they did in the 1960s. It looked very much like this. Broken bits of mirror, you know. Like clearly different in different shapes. Like somebody broke a mirror and glued it on. It wasn't like that. It wasn't like they, you know, got all these little regular pieces. And at the time it would have essentially been Christmas lights. Somebody's wife was going to be really upset when she got home. Because it was a thick mirror. And we have, as they did in the show, the rotation of the nacelle end caps rotates the same way that propellers would rotate on an aircraft. So they rotate counter to each other. Because other than that the whole thing would kind of, you know, so it in that way mimics what they knew from aircraft logic. And it does mean that one side slowly tightens itself. And one side slowly over a year or two loosens itself. And we have had to go back in to tighten up that screw and put a little Loctite on it to make sure that it that it stays where it needs to go. And the other piece that we're next to, that we're not going to touch, is this, you know, the flector disc that's at the very very front of that engineering hull. This is original. And this is original. This is 3D printed. The, again, we had that was broken. Yeah. And it was replaced by something that was called with no affection the salad bowl. And this is based on, you know, really being able to scan some original pictures and then 3D print this piece that would replicate it. But I love the way it looks. A little like a kind of chess piece. It's amazing. You also get to see the contrast of just how much variegation they threw into the paint job to lend some contour and scale. Yes. And I've learned more about paint in those few years, you know, and all of those online quizzes of what color does this dress look like and how does this paint color look under which light. And I'm like, you know, let me tell you. So and we have put up the values. They're all on the Smithsonian's on the Air and Space Museum's website. We've one of the parts of the project that we did with this was a kind of radical transparency. I went to conventions and talked to fans, told them everything we were working on. Every time we got through a step in the process, we threw it up on our website for the modelers who want to make their paint job look like this paint job, understanding differences in scale, because paint scales as well, color scales. We've put those values up and you can find them on our website. So, you know, for every piece, you know what we were working with. I'm originally a polymer chemist. And so, I mean, paint is really complicated. And actually, just the fact that this is so interdisciplinary, like you couldn't just have the paint chemist. I mean, you have the storytellers, the mechanical, the 3D print. I mean, it's amazing how many different disciplines it takes to do this. It's like a city. Yes. For the case for this alone, I could point to places where we got the font from John Van Sitters at CBS. We got the text font from the Okudas. They had the, you know, and so we were kind of going through each piece of this about, you know, any bit of labeling, anything that we were doing with it. Really, you could point to that case and say, everybody on that team had a If you look at this under a certain light and we'll get a shot so you can see it, you can actually see a slight amount of cracking on the paint. Yes, there's a lot of cracking and crazing that has come with the age of the paint and the varnish that's on the top. Is the signage original? Most of it is. There's one letter, I want to say it's one of the S's that doesn't fluoresce in the same way. Because you just can't recreate the same paint. Oh yeah, they're slightly different shapes. Yeah, but we've done as much as we could. You don't fix the E on purpose. We're going to look at that one. So, but I know that one of the ends, and I'm not going to be able to remember which one offhand, was applied upside down. The variation on this, the subtlety of the detail. And so these are kind of plex pieces that are dropped in. And then a lot of this comes from ships and from airplanes, right? So the port side is marked with red. The starboard side is marked with green. And these little lights that blink on the sides are basically marbles. Really? And we'll drop them in. That's what that bag of marbles is. That's what the bag of marbles is. Oh man. And these are just access ports to get to the lights. Those are, and they are themselves windows. Oh, they are. Okay, they do light. They will light up. And they will light the windows that are in front of them. So it's a rather ingenious design where he found kind of a few places. The studio originally ordered the model and Richard Dayton, who was the model maker who built this, asked them, are you going to want it to be internally lit? And they said no, they didn't want to pay for it. And then he delivered it and then they said, could it have internal lights? Of course. Classic. So he figured out how to reverse engineer it. And in that way, kind of, I wonder if he built them in, in slightly different ways than he might have had he had the access of being able to do it from, you know, from the very beginning of working that wiring in. Instead, I think he found these very creative ways to put bits of lighting in enough spots that it creates the effect. I can imagine he was a little pissed after that phone call though. Has this informed any modern design? I think it very much has. You know, we were saying that, you know, pretty much every fictional ship after this, I think, has to stand up to what the standard that this model set. What's been kind of fascinating is to think about the ways that, you know, when you talk to someone like Andrew Probert, who developed the D, one of the things he was looking at his aircraft and spacecraft and looking at how those designs changed over time. And then trying to think about if you started with this design and it was going to undergo the same kinds of technological evolutions, what would it look like? And how do you create something that looks like it is the descendant of this design, the way that you can look at a Mustang and understand it's the descendant of an original Mustang design or a spacecraft. So, there's a lot of interplay back and forth. And I will say that, you know, when we've had people like John Goodson here, he comes to the museum and he takes very, very weird pictures of like, oh, there's a bit of scorching on the back of that aircraft. It's precisely what I did. And I want a close, close picture. Like, I'm like, big airplane. No, no, no. He's taking these wonderful detail photos that he's going to take home and blow up and try to figure out how do I replicate that on some fictional thing in the Mandalorian so it looks like a real thing. We all keep a morgue of reference. I'm noticing for the first time, since I've never seen this ship up close, I've seen it hanging. But looking at the way the nacelles are and the way they place, they are always drawing a perspective path. Yes. And it is always to a vanishing point. So, no matter which way you're looking at this ship, it's always describing that it's come from somewhere. Yes. Which is a beautiful bit of design. Well, and I'll show you one other neat thing, which is actually hard to get on camera, and that is the point, which is part of the genius of the model making is that they only built what they thought was going to show up on camera. Right. So, the inside of the port nacelle is detailed. And the inside of the starboard nacelle is trompe l'oeil. Oh, wow. Oh, my gosh. You're so right. They knew it was always going to be shot from this side. Well, why? Because that was the shot they were going to get. They had a second set of decals, so you could put the decals on in reverse and flip the film if you needed to. Amazing. And that's easier and simpler. That's not fair. But that was one of the things when we were working this out is we needed to get this as detailed, and I tried at some point to show it to a documentary crew, and the cameraman complained it doesn't show up on film. Right. It doesn't show up on film, and I'm like, that's the point. Is that you can't easily tell the difference, but they knew this side would get more attention, and so they built out all the detail, and then they just basically mirrored it as inexpensively as they could. That is really neat. I love this Trump boy on the inside. Yes. Looking at this, it never occurred to me before, but with the modern capsules, I mean, we're going back to the moon, and people look, and they're sort of like, oh. And I go, well, it's physics. Physics hasn't changed, and a capsule is still the most efficient way to get through space, so to speak. But you look at this, and you realize that this has built in a secret disappointment to everyone when they see capsules. Yes. I love the shuttle bay, and I noticed off camera, I was looking, there's little lights inside there, too. Yes. Yeah, there's lights all the way down the end, and it really creates it, and that was one of the places where that advisory committee, I would say, saved me weeks right off the bat. Someone came in and said, you know, what about this particular window on the starboard side? How should it be lit? What color should it be? And I'm making a note to myself, like, I'm going to need to do weeks of research on this, and somebody, and I don't remember who, said, oh, in such and such episode, you see it this way, it would be that, and I felt like, there we go. That was worth everyone's air fare to have, you know, that just, and everybody was satisfied, like, yes, that is the right answer, and move on, and so that was a wonderful part of the collaboration, was being able to have that kind of depth of knowledge and lore, because that's really, you know, I will say that is part of the privilege and responsibility of getting to be the curator, the caretaker for this object. You know, I think at the Smithsonian, we're always aware that we are holding these things for the American people, for the world. You are stewards of them. We are stewards of them. They're not ours. They, you know, very clearly, this Star Trek fandom understands that this is theirs, and we are just holding it, and it has a life and a fandom on its own, and that is great fun to get to interact with, and to just tap into how much knowledge is in the room anytime you go in to talk about this. I've worked on this for years, and there's always something coming out of the crowd that's unexpected, that pulls things together in a fun new way, and the life that the franchise has created, and that interplay with the fandom, I think, is just part of why this really is an artifact that should be in the National Collection. I couldn't agree more, and in the virtuous cycle that this creates, when you speak of the Star Trek fandom, many members of that fandom are at JPL, and at Johnson, and at Canaveral, and many of them have been to the ISS. And they're at the Smithsonian. I had taught a space history and science fiction class when I was a graduate student and a young professor, and it was one of the great things when I had the opportunity to interview for this job, to be able to say, I have several years of experience in teaching Star Trek as an academic subject, because it's a really rich text for thinking about history, about gender, about race, about, civil rights, and all of the kinds of issues that the show was addressing, and space flight and aspiration, and then pulling that all together. Well, I mean, I'm so glad we live in a time where I got to grow up with Star Wars, and Battlestar Galactica, and the reboot, and all the social commentary embedded in all of those franchises. And I'm so delighted that there's a utopia as part of the mix, because we need the point, the counterpoint. I love the whole Star Trek universe that we have solved the world's social problems, so now let's go explore some bigger issues. I never get tired of visiting the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. I always find something new to lock onto, and the tail-on display of human ingenuity is always inspiring. If you'd like to get a better sense of what it's like to stand in front of a space shuttle, or visit the Spacesuit Conservation Lab, we also film this in virtual reality as part of the Tested VR series. You can watch this right now, either through the Tested VR app, or on MediQuest TV. Links and instructions are in the description below. Thanks, you guys, for watching.