[I try to start my day writing 250 words on anything. I’ll post one every Tuesday until I run out of good ones.]
Nerd Debate Day! In my opinion, there are three science-fictional spaceships that stand head and shoulders above all others.
Three: The Discovery from 2001: A Space Odyssey, which resembled a column of vertebrae connecting a skull to a pelvis. Its bulky nuclear engine was at the rear, far from the spherical crew compartment, which had a centrifuge to provide gravity. It was an elegant, practical-looking vessel, and director Stanley Kubrick shot it beautifully.
Two: The Eagle ships from Space: 1999 were better-conceived than the TV program they were on. Eagles were adaptable: different specialized modules plugged into a cockpit/engine superstructure to carry cargo, passengers, or scientific instruments. It was a utilitarian, no-nonsense vehicle and a reasonably speculative extension of NASA's lunar module design.
One: Star Trek’s Enterprise was, I contend, the first make-believe spacecraft that really felt like it flew people through space. Earlier ships looked like the sparkler-spewing models they were; one Enterprise contemporary, the Jupiter 2 from Lost in Space, was an unconvincing pie pan with lights and legs. The Enterprise had it all: scale, grace, dynamism.
One quality my favorite spaceships share is verisimilitude. They feel plausible. Kubrick was a stickler for scientific accuracy. The Eagle’s modularity was elegantly engineered. Enterprise designer Matt Jeffries applied principles of real-world aeronautical design.
There are many other contenders: the Millennium Falcon, Firefly’s Serenity, Battlestar Galactica, Nostromo, Dark Star. I think much of what makes a spaceship great is the emotion we attach to it. Love the show, love the ship.
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