Captain kirk portable#

Four years later, Nasa’s first laptop computer, which went to space on the shuttle Columbia, rejoiced in the code name SPOC (for Shuttle Portable Onboard Computer). At the climax of the 1979 film Star Trek: The Motion Picture, it was revealed that the mysterious antagonist V’Ger, a vast and inscrutable alien capable of destroying all life on Earth, was in fact one of the agency’s Voyager probes, returned from a trip to deep space having acquired a personality. In the years that followed, Star Trek and Nasa continued to feed off each other. On the bridge … Nichelle Nichols as Lt Uhura in the first Star Trek series, 1967. Six women and three Black men made it through to the final cohort, among them Sally Ride, the first American woman in space. (Asked how she had landed the shuttle safely on a tricky computer simulation, she shrugged and explained that Uhura must have done it for her.) By the end of her stint, she had boosted the agency’s Black and ethnic minority applications from 35 to more than 1,000, and increased the applications from women 16 fold. Nichols spent four months touring the country on a gruelling schedule of public engagements, as well as undergoing astronaut training. The following year, after Uhura actor Nichelle Nichols gave a moving speech criticising the lack of diversity among Nasa astronauts – “Where are my people?” she demanded – the space agency put her on the payroll, with a mission to help recruit a new shuttle cohort as diverse as the crew of the Enterprise. He obliged, inviting the entire Star Trek cast to the grand ceremony – Shatner apparently had a prior engagement – in which the new vessel emerged from its hanger to the tune of Alexander Courage’s soaring Star Trek theme, played with gusto by an air force band. By the time the first space shuttle was ready to be unveiled in 1976, President Ford had received tens of thousands of letters from Trekkers begging him to christen it the Enterprise. It is just the latest chapter in a long, complicated and symbiotic relationship between Star Trek and real-world space exploration. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/CBS/Getty Images Leonard Nimoy as Spock and William Shatner as Cpt Kirk in Star Trek.

Captain kirk