Spaceships

Science fiction would not be the same if it were not for the spaceships that have transported both passengers and viewers to strange far-away lands on screen, starting with 1902’s A Trip to the Moon. The famous USS Enterprise NCC-1701 was designed in 1960 by Matt Jefferies for the television series Star Trek. George Lucas’ Star Wars introduced different spaceship designs that owed more than a little to Victorian author Jules Verne.

The inspiration for space ships dates back even further: Seattle’s Museum of Science Fiction exhibits an early 1500’s drawing by Leonardo Da Vinci outlining the image of a helicopter, a concept as visionary in its day as a spaceship was to a Victorian. Real life scientists, engineers and designers often draw on these fictional spaceships for inspiration. A perfect example of the influence of science fiction on design is illustrated in an edition of the Air Wonder Stories publication, dated July 1929. The drawing features airplanes stopping to refuel at an island that is floating in outer space. The concept, which at the time was unimaginable, has a modern interpretation: it is not uncommon to see a large plane refuelling a smaller plane in mid-air.

Director Stanley Kubrick hired two NASA specialists to design the spaceships he used in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Striving for realism, it took him three years to complete a project that should have taken six months. Despite his efforts, his creation, named Discovery, differed from NASA’s Discovery: it had a round nose while the real spaceship has a pointed nose.

Nevertheless, Kubrick’s Discovery is more realistic than Star Trek’s USS Enterprise, a needlessly aerodynamic spaceship since vessels only need to be aerodynamic when they enter the earth’s atmosphere, which Enterprise never does.