This Week in Space 227 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.
 

Tariq Malik [00:00:00]:
Coming up on This Week in Space, China is targeting Mars for a sample return mission in 2028. The US Space Command just completed its first orbital dogfighting test actually in space. And Star Trek is 60, with Rod Pyle and I getting down to basics about Trek's look and legacy with the legendary graphic designer himself, Mike Okuda. Don't miss it and tune in.

TWiT.tv [00:00:25]:
Podcasts you love. From people you trust.

TWiT.tv [00:00:29]:
This is TWiT.

Rod Pyle [00:00:32]:
This is This Week in Space, episode number 227, recorded on September 11th, 2026. TrekMania! Hello and welcome to another edition of This Week in Space, the TrekMania edition. Ladies and gentlemen, this is going to be a special one because we have Michael Kuda coming on. But first, I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief at Astromagazine, and I'm here with my old pal, the one, the only, the forever Tarek Malik. How are you, sir?

Tariq Malik [00:00:59]:
I'm doing all right, Rod. I'm doing all right. Live long and prosper, my friend. How are you? How are you?

Rod Pyle [00:01:03]:
I'm good, and you too. And we're quite excited to be speaking with Mike, who is billed— yeah, TV credits across a number of Star Trek properties— the scenic art supervisor, unquote, but is so much more. And as anyone who tracks Star Trek knows, uh, he knows more about that franchise and other space-themed shows than, than Tarek and I know about anything. So it's, it's, it's going to be pretty amazing to talk to him. But first, Let us dip down to the dregs and have a space joke from Anonymous.

Tariq Malik [00:01:34]:
Anonymous! Anonymous!

Rod Pyle [00:01:36]:
Hey, Tarn!

Tariq Malik [00:01:37]:
Yes, Rod?

Rod Pyle [00:01:38]:
How many Starfleet engineers does it take to change a light bulb?

Tariq Malik [00:01:41]:
Uh, I don't know, how many?

Rod Pyle [00:01:43]:
None. Scotty just says he cannot give it any more power and then fixes it himself in half the time originally estimated. Uh-huh.

Tariq Malik [00:01:50]:
One more.

Rod Pyle [00:01:51]:
That's a good one.

Tariq Malik [00:01:53]:
Put your name on it.

Rod Pyle [00:01:54]:
One more. Well, one more.

Tariq Malik [00:01:55]:
Okay.

Rod Pyle [00:01:56]:
Why did the warp core go to therapy?

Tariq Malik [00:01:58]:
Uh, I don't know, why?

Rod Pyle [00:02:00]:
Because it had containment issues. Now I've heard that some folks want to dump us into the warp core when it's joke time on this show, but you can help by sending us your best, worst, or most indifferent space joke at twists@twit.tv, and we'll be happy to blame it on you on the air. Now on to headline news!

Tariq Malik [00:02:23]:
Headline news!

Rod Pyle [00:02:24]:
I was late.

Tariq Malik [00:02:25]:
I was late in the day. That felt late, right?

Rod Pyle [00:02:30]:
All right. I'll take a few bits of Mars with some plum sauce, please. We have just heard the announcement that China will launch a Mars sample return mission in 2028. And despite my kidding tone, this is a very big deal.

Tariq Malik [00:02:43]:
That's a big deal.

Rod Pyle [00:02:44]:
Now, from the US side, former Mars czar Scott Hubbard calls it a Sputnik moment and a crisis for the West. In a more generalized, slightly less nationalistic view, I hate to say it this way, but we had our shot. And we took that shot and shot ourselves in the foot and said, oh, it's too expensive, and canceled our, I think, arguably much more ambitious version of this. In our world, because we started this back in the early development of the Perseverance rover—

Tariq Malik [00:03:18]:
When you say we, you mean NASA? NASA, yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:03:21]:
Thank you. We set a mission with a rover, with prospecting tools, that could go drill core samples, put them in containment, leave some behind. One way or another, those were to be picked up and brought back to Earth by Mars Sample Return. The budget was always in contention. It was going up and up and up. Now, as I've said before, JPL said, well, somewhere north of $7 billion, maybe as much as $11 billion. Somehow that got transmuted when the current administration was talking about ranting about this and said, oh, it's going to be $11 billion, that's too much. In fact, chief of NASA said that at the time.

Rod Pyle [00:04:00]:
And so that was the end of that. And we now have scattered fragments of what should have been our Mars sample return.

Tariq Malik [00:04:08]:
Yeah, well, well, you, like my father-in-law says, if you, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys, right? And so we don't have, we don't have any, any Mars monkeys to, to say, but China, we've been expecting China to make this announcement because they've been building up to it in a step-by-step with their lunar sample returns with the Chang'e missions. In fact, they just delayed the Chang'e 7 mission to 2027. But this sample return, Tianwen-3, I think I'm saying that correctly, is supposed to launch in 2028 on 2 Long March 5 rockets from the Wenchang Space Launch Center. That's the one that's on Hainan Island. That's the newest one. And it will launch, you know, the mission in 2 parts to send the lander and sample return capsule vehicle there. It will scoop up, you know, in a very straightforward approach, samples from around the landing site rather than driving around and, and grabbing a bunch of stuff and then coming back again and whatnot. But it will have a lander and ascender, a service capsule, which is the, the kind of transfer thing, an orbiter, so that it can rendezvous with to come back to Earth, and then the reentry module itself that lands back on the planet.

Tariq Malik [00:05:23]:
And, you know, very very straightforward approach. You know, it's land, scoop up the samples, come back. And, and so we'll see how that goes. And if they're saying that they're going to do it in 2028, that means they're going to probably do it, because they usually don't announce it until they know that it's going to happen. Now, they have had some challenges with some of the Moon missions. Like I mentioned, Chang'e 7 was supposed to launch actually last month in August. And now it's slipped to sometime early 2027 because of the the windows for that. But we'll have to see how that all goes, going, if it goes according to plan or not.

Tariq Malik [00:05:56]:
And then that's a mission to the South Pole of the Moon, as I understand it, with a lot more other things like rover, lander, that kind of thing. And so those are, those are kind of big technologies to test ahead of this mission as well. But we've already seen them land on Mars. And we've seen them rendezvousing with an asteroid with Tianwen-2, as they're going to do to bring samples back. there. So this is kind of the next big leap in terms of their sample return missions there.

Rod Pyle [00:06:24]:
Can I sound like a grumpy old man? And as I'm watching this video of the progression of the mission and say, gosh, this technology looks very familiar. And not from lunar sample return.

Tariq Malik [00:06:35]:
But if it's not—

Rod Pyle [00:06:36]:
I digress.

Tariq Malik [00:06:37]:
If it's not broke, don't fix it, right? And so—

Rod Pyle [00:06:39]:
If it's not broke, do steal it. Okay. Next up, orbital dogfighting. Take it away.

Tariq Malik [00:06:46]:
This is a good one. Yeah, my colleague Brett, Brett Tingley found this one. And, and this comes from Space Command, US Space Command, not Star Command.

Rod Pyle [00:06:55]:
Space Command!

Tariq Malik [00:06:56]:
That's Buzz Lightyear. But, but Space Command, which includes the Space Force as well as other, other groups, announced this week that they completed, quote unquote, Apollo Maneuvers 2026. And this was an actual test in space that included what they call Dynamic on-orbit operations to validate contested logistics and advanced collective space maneuver doctrine. From what I can understand, that means fly the spacecraft close to the other spacecraft to show that you can reach that spacecraft, right? And so, so they, they, like the colloquial term to describe what they're doing is, quote unquote, orbital dogfighting, but it means getting your spacecraft next to another spacecraft in contested space to either do reconnaissance, maybe to do interceptions, because that is something that is, um, is coming up in a lot of discussions with the U.S. military right now. And, uh, and it's just, it's like another example of the more overt weaponization and of space and role that space is having in the quote-unquote warfighting, uh, domain right now. Uh, and it's something that we should probably all like understand is going to become more and more standard over time. So, but they said that they've got it, it's a success for them right now.

Tariq Malik [00:08:11]:
And there's probably going to be more of these to come. This was the first time they've done it, which saw the spacecraft maneuvering through a simulated contested environment. And, and it's probably not going to be the last.

Rod Pyle [00:08:23]:
All right. And on to a more somber note, this is the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attack when tragedy struck New York. Terrorists targeted the World Trade Center and the Pentagon with hijacked jetliners, with the loss of an awful lot of people on the ground and the people in the planes.

Tariq Malik [00:08:41]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:08:42]:
And the loss of another plane in Pennsylvania. And I believe you have some video from orbit and a personal experience to relate.

Tariq Malik [00:08:50]:
Well, I mean, you know, this was an event that I think affected all of us. I had just moved to New York City. a week or two before that happened. And, and, and, and, you know, so that was a very kind of shocking and tragic thing to experience.

Rod Pyle [00:09:08]:
Mm-hmm.

Tariq Malik [00:09:08]:
My wife had this, like, had to evacuate from her home, you know, there. Luckily, it wasn't anything more serious than that. But it, it affected a lot of people's lives, including NASA astronaut Frank Culbertson, who was the only, you know, American in space as commander of Expedition 3 on the International Space Station with 2 cosmonauts. And he watched everything unfold from orbit, like no other person could. And I think we've got a bit of what he was thinking, you know, here with this NASA clip here.

Media Playback [00:09:41]:
I didn't know exactly what was happening, but I knew it was really bad, because there was a big cloud of debris covering Manhattan. We flew past New York City and saw the effects of that attack on that city. That's when it really became painful, because it was like seeing a wound in the side of your country, of your family, your friends. I was visiting Williamsburg, and there was a veteran.

Tariq Malik [00:10:06]:
So, you know, it's just, it's something that it is worth stopping to reflect on, kind of the, you know, those attacks and the effects that they had, all the lives that were lost, as well. But—

Rod Pyle [00:10:18]:
And the lives, excuse me, the lives that are still affected by it, with the rescuers.

Tariq Malik [00:10:22]:
That's right.

Tariq Malik [00:10:22]:
Exactly.

Rod Pyle [00:10:23]:
More people.

Tariq Malik [00:10:23]:
Yeah, exactly. But Culbertson did go on to say at that time, in real time, by the way, that New York, like, that the city was still beautiful. He wanted to reassure people, right? And it still is today. So, it's worth mentioning, you know, just to reflect on that, because it's really something that affected, I think, all of us.

Tariq Malik [00:10:43]:
So.

Rod Pyle [00:10:45]:
Yeah, it's hard to know what else to say, except we'll remember this for many decades, if not centuries to come. And Our hearts go out to everybody who was affected and is still affected. And on a happier note, we'll be back in just a moment to discuss Star Trek at 60 years, so stick around. And we are back with the one, the only, the magnificent Michael Okuda. Mike, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure and an honor to have you here.

Michael Okuda [00:11:13]:
Thank you for having me.

Rod Pyle [00:11:15]:
This is something I've been wanting to do for years. And so I was checking your bona fides yesterday, and you list yourself on LinkedIn, which is everybody's source for such things when they're working in a hurry, as a graphic artist, which is underselling it a little bit. So then I checked your Paramount listing and they said, well, he's a scenic art supervisor on a whole bunch of Trek credits. And for as long as I can remember, you've actually been more the cardinal of canon for the entire franchise, Mr. Go-To for anything visual and sets and sometimes VFX. And I know you had a lot of help, but, but don't be too modest here.

Michael Okuda [00:11:56]:
It was a big team.

Rod Pyle [00:11:58]:
It was. But, you know, when you talk to a lot of those team members, they all say, well, start with Mike. Um, and you were heavily involved with a number of other sci-fi shows, which we'll, we'll mention, uh, later on here. But how would you like to be remembered out of all these many credits and titles?

Michael Okuda [00:12:17]:
Well, I think the biggest contribution was graphic artist for, uh, uh, for Star Trek, uh, simply, simply because Star Trek had such a, uh, an impact. And Star Trek was one of the first shows that understood that graphics really helped define the universe.

Rod Pyle [00:12:36]:
Very well said. And this all began on Star Trek: The Motion Picture, correct?

Michael Okuda [00:12:41]:
Um, my first Star Trek was Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

Rod Pyle [00:12:45]:
Ooh.

Michael Okuda [00:12:46]:
I had, after Star Trek II, you know, the Enterprise bridge used to have these cool round screens.

Rod Pyle [00:12:54]:
Yeah.

Michael Okuda [00:12:54]:
Uh, but the, the graphics on them, the information was, was rectangular in format. Right. And I'm going, well, that's kind of inappropriate. So I thought, well, if you have round screens, why would you have round screens? Well, obviously to show, uh, because you have a display style that's, that's circular, that's radial.

Tariq Malik [00:13:13]:
Yeah.

Michael Okuda [00:13:13]:
Well, I thought, well, what might that look like? that's kind of interesting and fun and futuristic. So I did a bunch of sketches and just for laughs, I sent it into Paramount. And I got a call from Ralph Winter. This is just before they did Star Trek III, saying, we're already staffed up on Star Trek III, but if we ever do a Star Trek IV, I'll give you a call. So Star Trek IV comes up, he calls, and I was living in Hawaii at the time, I flew back and forth from Hawaii to work on IV. After that I figured, well, okay, that was fun, that was my big foray into Hollywood. Just before IV came out Paramount announced they're doing Star Trek: The Next Generation so I sent all that material to Roddenberry's office and At the cast and crew screening, he called me and said— or he— I ran into him at the cast and crew screening and he said, well, I told him I was gonna go visit ILM. He said, well, before you accept anything there, I hope you'll give us a shot.

Tariq Malik [00:14:26]:
Wow.

Rod Pyle [00:14:26]:
And at this point, you and Denise, your co-conspirator, were already married, correct?

Michael Okuda [00:14:30]:
No, no, we got married during the run of Next Generation.

Rod Pyle [00:14:34]:
Oh, you did?

Tariq Malik [00:14:34]:
Oh, wow. Wow.

Rod Pyle [00:14:36]:
That's time honored. Okay, Tarek's got a question he's burning to ask. Okay.

Tariq Malik [00:14:40]:
Well, so, so, so, Mike, I couldn't help but notice the shelves in your background with all of those, those space exploration ships and whatnot. And one of the things that I love to ask everyone that appears on the show is kind of when they first were bitten by the space bug, or in this case, The space and Star Trek bug, although you kind of gave us a preview of that there as well. So I'm just kind of curious, what was your first experience with either space or with the whole franchise overall, if it was like the Original Series or not, for those 2 things that kind of converged into a lifelong endeavor?

Michael Okuda [00:15:25]:
Well, I was a space geek long before, long before Star Trek came on. I remember going to the state capitol in Honolulu. It must have been 1963 to see Gordon Cooper's Mercury capsule.

Rod Pyle [00:15:47]:
Wow.

Michael Okuda [00:15:47]:
And I pored over that diagram that NASA handed out. And I was kind of shocked to realize you couldn't actually float around in that thing. Once you took off, you couldn't actually fly around. You couldn't land and take off again. And so that led me to read a lot more. And I followed the Apollo program and the Gemini program through the '60s. So when Star Trek came on, I'm like, this is the nth generation of what these guys are doing. And that absolutely sucked me in.

Rod Pyle [00:16:27]:
Now, you saw the Mercury capsule. Did you ever see up— I'm sure you have up close the Gemini capsule.

Michael Okuda [00:16:37]:
I've seen one of the Gemini— I think it's Gemini 8 in the California Museum of Science and Industry. Oh, and also there was one at the Air and Space Museum.

Rod Pyle [00:16:48]:
And I always, when I see the cabin of those things, and I got to sit in a simulator once years ago. I try to imagine spending 2 weeks in there without being able to even stretch out your legs like those guys did, and I think, okay, those are the heroes of space. I mean, we've had many since then, but spending 2 weeks in that thing—

Michael Okuda [00:17:07]:
Yes. That's the—

Rod Pyle [00:17:08]:
just the idea of that and sitting in that simulator with the hatch closed for a minute before I started to break into a sweat made me realize my boyhood dreams of being an astronaut were for naught. Now, my first introduction to Next Gen Uh, okay.

Michael Okuda [00:17:23]:
Can I, can I say, uh, sure, you're probably going to talk about this a little bit later, but, uh, uh, Denise and I work on an Apple TV show called For All Mankind. And during our first season, we had, uh, a museum-quality replica of the, of the Apollo command module, which according to the astronauts was much more spacious than the Mercury or Gemini capsules. But even so, it was incredibly claustrophobic to work in there, especially if you had to crawl in there while there's other actors actors in there and say, push that button.

Rod Pyle [00:17:57]:
And they like to say when you're weightless, it seems much roomier, but I don't know. Tarek and I were at Johnson during the Artemis II mission and they took us over to the simulator. It's still small, right? The Orion capsule is bigger, but it's still small.

Tariq Malik [00:18:10]:
I mean, I sat in the shuttle trainer and even then I couldn't believe how small it was.

Michael Okuda [00:18:14]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:18:15]:
So yeah, it is surprising you to get up to that top deck. So my first introduction to Next Gen was working at Filmfare where Gary Hutzel, one of your premier visual effects supervisors, was also working, and Rob Legato was working. And Rob was a commercial producer there, and Rob and I interfaced quite a bit. We didn't always get along, but we interfaced a lot. And suddenly he was taken off for this thing called Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I thought, what's that? And then soon it was time for Gary to go off and work at the same show, and it was— You know, I think a lot of us were sort of, how are they gonna reboot this series? And what are they gonna do? What's it gonna look like? And so forth. And we saw Encounter at Farpoint, which was the pilot, I guess. And it was spectacular. And you were there.

Rod Pyle [00:19:08]:
So maybe if you could just kind of talk to us about the origins of getting involved with that show, which became 7 years for you.

Michael Okuda [00:19:17]:
Well, as I said, it was at the premiere of Star Trek IV. After the screening, there was a little reception in the lobby. I saw Gene Roddenberry. I went over to kiss the ring.

Rod Pyle [00:19:37]:
Yes.

Michael Okuda [00:19:38]:
And he asked, what are you doing next? And I had been invited to visit ILM, so of course I'm going to go up to Industrial Light and Magic. I said, I'm going to go up to ILM. Gene said, well, I hope before you take anything there you'll accept or you'll consider us. That's when I knew I had a shot at working on the new show. It was very interesting because Gene had the considerable courage to say, okay, here's what we did in the original Star Trek, We're going to do something different. That's not an easy thing to do because when you have millions of dollars at stake you want to hedge your bets, you want to make things as familiar as possible. In my case, I was in charge of the control panels and such and I really wanted to— I'm a huge fan of the original Star Trek and I wanted to riff off of what Matt Jeffries had done. I love those blinky display screens.

Michael Okuda [00:20:49]:
People make fun of them, but to me, they're ingeniously organized icons that tell you a lot of important stuff. And I wanted to take that and push it a little further and return to, for example, that color scheme. Because as I I loved it.

Rod Pyle [00:21:10]:
The fluorescence. And, and I think we got to talk about those exact things when we come back. Uh, we're going to take a quick break. Before we do, did you ever see any logical order in all the blinky lights in either Lost in Space or Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea? Because I could not.

Michael Okuda [00:21:25]:
Uh, though, no, absolutely not.

Rod Pyle [00:21:27]:
But they're just blinky lights. Okay.

Michael Okuda [00:21:29]:
But they were, but they were cool.

Rod Pyle [00:21:32]:
Yes, they were. And that's what mattered, right? Along with the, the tinfoil meteors in Lost in Space. Okay, we'll be right back. So don't go anywhere.

Tariq Malik [00:21:41]:
Yeah, well, I think to build on that, and I think, Mikey, you actually answered part of my initial question too about being a huge fan of the original series too. So now I know your first taste of space and now that your first taste of Star Trek, but it was the L cars look, I think, that really grabbed me. I had a— I had an encyclopedia of this for my computer.

Rod Pyle [00:22:09]:
Of course you did.

Tariq Malik [00:22:10]:
Where you could go through all the things, and it was phenomenal to be able to do. And, and this, I think, really has defined for a generation what science fiction and what Star Trek has been. And now we're, of course, we're at the 60th anniversary there. And, and there's like the pads that predate, right, the iPads themselves. And so— Yeah, but 2001 came first. No, I suppose so.

Rod Pyle [00:22:38]:
That's right.

Tariq Malik [00:22:39]:
That's true.

Michael Okuda [00:22:39]:
Yeah.

Tariq Malik [00:22:40]:
Um, and so, so I'm just wondering when you are approaching a reboot essentially, or, uh, of, uh, at that side, like, like what your thought processes are there, 'cause you can see that curved the influence that you were talking about earlier.

Michael Okuda [00:22:58]:
Mm-hmm.

Tariq Malik [00:22:59]:
But like, how do you go about setting up that tone that has now gone on for a generation?

Michael Okuda [00:23:07]:
As I was saying earlier, I originally wanted to riff off of what Matt Jefferies had done and Gene, to his very considerable credit, said, no, I don't want to do that. That immediately threw me into a tailspin. He had said that he wanted the technology of Star Trek to be something that he called technology unchained, so advanced that it becomes simple.

Tariq Malik [00:23:34]:
Mm-hmm.

Michael Okuda [00:23:35]:
And so what I tried to do with the— I call them organization bars of the Elkhart style. I wanted there to be a very, very strong, obvious sense of organization, even from a considerable distance. Even if that shape is in the background and out of focus, I want you to know these are grouped together, this flows into that, this intersects with that. And even if you don't necessarily know what it does, you have a sense that it's organized. But it's done so— but you're organizing something very complex. It's not just a matrix. The elements are organized, they flow together. And hopefully, if you were to look at it closely enough and long enough, it might make sense.

Michael Okuda [00:24:28]:
But we're off to the next one.

Tariq Malik [00:24:33]:
Yeah, but what does LCARS mean again? Is it just a—

Michael Okuda [00:24:37]:
Library Computer Access and Retrieval System.

Tariq Malik [00:24:41]:
There you go, there you go, for folks who may have always wondered.

Rod Pyle [00:24:44]:
So, and Mike, were you involved with the Windows version of this that somebody put together years ago?

Michael Okuda [00:24:51]:
No, they— I, I, uh, someone sent me a link way back when and I'm like, wow, this looks great.

Rod Pyle [00:24:57]:
Did it actually work?

Michael Okuda [00:24:59]:
I don't have a Windows machine, so I take their word for it.

Rod Pyle [00:25:05]:
Very smart guy. So I'm going to kind of jump ahead here a little bit. Um, you know, with the departure of Roddenberry back in the '80s, since then over the ensuing decades— and pardon me for gushing here a bit, just roll with it— you've kind of, in a way, to the public, I think, become At least a Roddenberry, if not the Roddenberry. In other words, as I mentioned earlier, sort of the cardinal of canon for Star Trek at this point. And I remember sitting back in— what was the name of the edit facility we worked in? It was in Santa Monica.

Michael Okuda [00:25:39]:
Post Group? Digital Magic?

Rod Pyle [00:25:40]:
No.

Michael Okuda [00:25:41]:
Level 3?

Rod Pyle [00:25:42]:
Post Group. I think it was Post Group. Occasionally the phone would ring, and I'm just sitting there like, You know, putting together layers of passes on— this is for Deep Space Nine on the station. And the phone would ring and I'd go, hi, Bay 3. And some guy would be there going, yeah, you know, on episode 14, they went in through the 3rd door down the hallway instead of the 4th door. And I wondered— and, you know, this long thing. And it's like, all I can think of is A, how did you find me? And B, I never saw that episode. And C, what's wrong with you? But I realized, you know, these are the people that really sort of feed the franchise, right? I mean, these are the true believers, the ones that will buy the paraphernalia and watch every episode.

Rod Pyle [00:26:28]:
And that, in a sense, it's almost become a religion to a lot of people. And you're sort of, in many ways, the guardian of the holy relic. I mean, what is that like?

Michael Okuda [00:26:39]:
There's a lot of people involved in continuity. Continuity is important. It makes the universe feel real. But one thing that Denise and I have tried to do in books like the Star Trek Encyclopedia and the Chronology, we try to record and present the show as we understand it, as we saw it, as we interpreted it. But we try wherever we can to have footnotes saying, okay, yes, this is this way because this is theoretically how the engineering section is laid out. But in fact, that door... is there because we needed a place to store paint. And we've found that, that the vast majority of fans are fascinated with, uh, with that dichotomy, how this universe, this imaginary universe, intersects and affects this universe, which is shaped by production and production needs and schedules and, and budgets.

Michael Okuda [00:27:40]:
And how much space, how much space do you have on the soundstage?

Tariq Malik [00:27:44]:
Wow. Wow. I'm curious if it's surprising at all that, you know, to Rod's point about, like, a franchise surviving on its fan base, but then giving folks like you opportunities to, you know, iterate or reimagine, you know, different versions through the different types of shows or programs or films and whatnot. What do you think is like the nut or the kernel that keeps people coming back then that has been at its core, the shining, I guess, beacon that brings people into the show? Is it just the central message? Is it the, like, the executive producing vision, that kind of thing? Or is it something entirely different that's a mix of all of that stuff together?

Michael Okuda [00:28:33]:
It's a Venn diagram. There's several things that intersect. There is certainly The stories. We have amazing writers and we have actors that bring a very attractive image of these people to life. But also there is Roddenberry's core vision that tomorrow can be a better place, that if we're smart, if we're compassionate, if we're inclusive, Um, if we work very hard, uh, it's not necessarily all over. And I think that's enormously attractive. And a lot of people like me just love the, the spaceships.

Tariq Malik [00:29:19]:
I, uh— Me too.

Michael Okuda [00:29:21]:
I would love to go out flying on that, on that, on a starship.

Rod Pyle [00:29:27]:
Now I have a question about your metal space, and let me back this up with just a short story. I was doing a speaking thing with Rick Sternbach a couple years ago, and I made some wiseass crack about push-button gravity and the mauve upholstery on Next Generation.

Tariq Malik [00:29:45]:
How dare you?

Rod Pyle [00:29:46]:
Well, and I said, you know, there's no such thing as push-button gravity. You're gonna have to deal with G-forces and all that kind of stuff, or zero-G and so forth. And Rick got very bristly, which is kind of rare for him, and said, oh no! You don't understand! And launched into this 10-minute explanation of the gravity generators and the Huma whatchacallits and so forth. And I just sat there in awe, not so much that he remembered all of it, although that was impressive, but that somebody sat down and worked all that stuff out, even though it might not be for the episode that week. And I know you guys are always being, you know, eaten alive by schedules and budgets and all that kind of stuff. So you're really moving fast. And it reminded me of how much imagination sits behind all this. So my question for you, I guess, is you at some point, probably at the very beginning of this, especially for Next Gen, had to sit there and put yourself in a certain mind space.

Rod Pyle [00:30:48]:
I mean, here's this guy that's a graphic designer from Hawaii who loves space, and now suddenly you have to transport yourself into the 24th century and say, okay, Here's what the computer interface is going to look like. Is there a bigger kind of message there in terms of how one puts themselves in that mindset going forward? Because you had to do it week after week after week. This wasn't just a one-shot deal.

Michael Okuda [00:31:12]:
Well, a lot of it, as you suggested, is simply, oh my God, this is due tomorrow morning. But also, one of the things I found very useful was I understood very early on, you cannot design a Starship warp drive. I can tell you about it, but none of us actually know how warp drive works, despite what we might have said in the tech manual. But a lot of times, I remember very specifically, one of the earliest graphics I designed was in the transporter room. Behind the operator is this large panel that I imagined was a system schematic. Now, again, I don't know how a matter-antimatter or matter-energy— Brodenberg called it a scrambler— works, but I can come up with some things that it probably needs. So I designed what I thought was an interesting-looking schematic, and I populated it with little icons and blocks representing different subsystems. And I found if I tell myself a little story, okay, there's energy has to come in, we have to scan the thing, so we need a set of scanners here, but, and the scanners need power, so we need a power supply for that.

Michael Okuda [00:32:35]:
And then we need a second system that we, that phase transition coils and I'm not imagining that I can design a transporter, but I can tell you about it, and, and that gives it some structure. So it looks, I hope, semi-credible. It looks— if you go closely, you go, oh yeah, well, there's quantum resolution scanners. I wonder what that does. What's the pattern buffer? What's a Heisenberg compensator?

Tariq Malik [00:33:09]:
And, but I imagine that there's like a lot of freedom, I think, um, to, to make little, how do you do it? Like little, little Easter eggs in there, right? Because it is, it is, it is a system that you get to design and you can kind of have the freedom to, I guess, label things or name things or, or depict things that might have more special resonance for you and the team that maybe the public wouldn't really notice because it's something that's there to really set the immersion, set the scene there for the crew or the actors themselves to play off, something that gives them that feeling. And I'm wondering if there's anything that was really special that really stuck with you that you We're so proud to sneak in that no one found.

Michael Okuda [00:34:03]:
So. Well, on, on Next Generation, uh, Sternbach and I were the resident space geeks, so they pretty much gave us free rein to, to label whatever we needed, uh, and such. And you, you always try to be, uh, conscious of what I call the threshold of resolution.

Tariq Malik [00:34:19]:
Mm-hmm.

Michael Okuda [00:34:19]:
That is, I can read pretty clearly that, that big type, that little type on that icon. I can tell that there's type there, but I, uh, uh, I don't think you're ever gonna actually be able to read it. So on a lot of little buttons or icons, I put the initials of the crew people who worked on the show.

Tariq Malik [00:34:37]:
Oh.

Michael Okuda [00:34:38]:
And that just like— that kind of— I just— I did that to amuse myself. And I should have put 2 and 2 together and realized everybody's gonna notice this. Everybody's gonna look— look for their—

Rod Pyle [00:34:50]:
For themselves.

Michael Okuda [00:34:51]:
Their name.

Rod Pyle [00:34:52]:
Yeah.

Michael Okuda [00:34:52]:
And so people like Rod Pyle would come up to me and say, uh, Tariq's on the control panel, why aren't I on the control panel? And I'd get into trouble.

Rod Pyle [00:35:03]:
Well, the same thing happened with the commissioning plaque for the ships, right?

Michael Okuda [00:35:07]:
Yeah. I designed the first commissioning plaque for the Enterprise-D and I put Gene Roddenberry, I put Andy Probert, I'm not sure I put Herman, but I put Matt Jeffries. Then 3rd or 4th season I redesigned it and made it a little fancier. And I put as many people as I could. I put 4 columns of names. And even then, people were going again, um, how come Rod's on it and I'm not?

Tariq Malik [00:35:42]:
That's a Rod move, right?

Rod Pyle [00:35:45]:
Hey, sorry, but I wasn't even in the show credits because I was always the last hire. Uh, we're gonna transport ourselves into a break and we'll be right back, so go nowhere. So just to follow up on the Easter egg thing, uh, there was some Hustle was shooting some big battle scene and he had one of the little— I guess it was AMT or Aurora kits way in the background. And I wandered over and it said the USS Raging Queen on it. And I didn't realize at the time that there had actually apparently been a pirate ship called the Raging Queen. I thought it was just a gag. But that was the first time I ever realized there were all these little things hidden in there. Are there any others you'd like to tell us about?

Tariq Malik [00:36:28]:
Hmm.

Rod Pyle [00:36:29]:
Or maybe not.

Michael Okuda [00:36:32]:
Whenever we went to, for example, Starfleet Command, I would try to put a building directory on the wall. And that was my chance to put as many people as possible on the list. And people noticed. The first time I did it was in an episode where I put Captain Rod Pyle, Lieutenant T'Lok.

Rod Pyle [00:36:58]:
Oh, I wish.

Michael Okuda [00:37:01]:
But what I learned later, what I found out to my considerable chagrin, is that again, people started coming up to me and saying, wait, why is Rod a captain? And I'm just, and I'm just a corporal. And I'm going, well, it doesn't actually affect your pay, you know. But from then on, uh, everyone was either an admiral if they— if you had producer in your, your job title, or you're a captain, because otherwise it, it would be bad for me.

Rod Pyle [00:37:38]:
So Tarek, uh, before we go to you, just very quickly, we have a question on the Discord from Patrick Delahanty, in the days before wikis and databases, how did you keep all the fictional text straight? Copious notes referencing scripts, or just a very good memory?

Tariq Malik [00:37:53]:
That's a good question.

Michael Okuda [00:37:54]:
That's a good question.

Tariq Malik [00:37:55]:
Uh, we were talking about continuity earlier.

Michael Okuda [00:37:57]:
Yeah, back in the day that there wasn't that much— during Next Generation, there wasn't that much. Um, so you could pretty much keep it in your heads. Um, a little later on, when Denise and I started working on the Star Trek Chronology and the Star Trek Encyclopedia, Yeah, endless Word documents, large Excel spreadsheets. And again, specifically when we were working on those books, Denise would say, oh, remember this? And I'd go, no, no, no, no, I worked on that episode. It was that. And she'd go, no, you're wrong. And she was right. I was remembering the third draft, And we filmed the 7th draft.

Michael Okuda [00:38:43]:
What we had to do doing those books is we literally had to watch every episode line by line and with a script in hand and correct it to air.

Tariq Malik [00:38:55]:
Oh.

Michael Okuda [00:38:56]:
What did he actually say? When he said, I don't have a brother, did he say it in a way— was the actual phrasing such that it precluded the possibility of him having a sister. And so we ended up— we had a lot of people who helped us doing research. We ended up with an 18-page questionnaire. You watch the episode, you fill out the questionnaire so we know where the ship was going before, where we're going afterwards, what happened, what stardate was it, how do we know that. And so that was quite a thing.

Tariq Malik [00:39:32]:
Wow. Wow. Did we need to go to a break, Rod, or no? Can we keep going? Because I had a question that builds off this one. Go for it. You know, one of the things, speaking of continuity, and just the reach of the franchise over the years and decades, is that there's a lot more. I think Rod has talked a little bit about how there's different ways for people to get their Star Trek fix now. I've got my chair, Right.

Michael Okuda [00:39:59]:
So I noticed.

Tariq Malik [00:40:01]:
So, and, um, and, and now there's like Lego sets, there's models, there's games, obviously. Um, I had a great time earlier this year playing the new Star Trek Voyager game. It was a lot of fun. But I'm curious how, like, you know, like you oversee that uniformity of the look so that this kind of aesthetic that you and the team have built maintains that sense of presence because there have been so many different Star Trek prizes. In fact, there's new cookware now. You can get a—

Michael Okuda [00:40:37]:
I saw that.

Tariq Malik [00:40:38]:
You can get a glove and they sent it to space, Rod. They sent a casserole dish to near space, right?

Rod Pyle [00:40:46]:
Cardassian casserole, I like it.

Tariq Malik [00:40:49]:
But I'm curious because— and I think we're gonna talk about Hallmark in a little bit, but I've got some some, some decorations as well. And there's even been like, you and Denise have done work with NASA. And I think you've spoken with my colleague, Rob, Robert Pearlman, about that crossover between like the Star Trek kind of look, but then applying that to the real life SpaceX space exploration that NASA has had as well. I guess the question is, how do you maintain all of that, that thread? Like, do you, do you just give people a rule sheet? When it gets handed off, or is it more involved than that?

Michael Okuda [00:41:29]:
Each succeeding show has to take it and run with it on their own because a lot of times they have a different mission statement than us. For example, when Discovery came on, or when the Abrams films came on, their mission statement was very specifically to do something different. Their team contacted I provided them with a lot of stuff. They wanted graphics and things. But beyond that, it was their responsibility to come up with a fresh look and to— but to keep it as consistent as they felt was appropriate. Within the shows that Denise and I worked on, yeah, we had the benefit of being able to say, this is the Federation style. This is the Klingon style, this is the Cardassian style, this is what the Romulans do. Actually, that was an enormous amount of fun because you're using essentially the same production technology to make the sets and the control panels and things, but you're finding specific things.

Michael Okuda [00:42:33]:
Even though the control panels might be made physically the same way, they have a different graphic style. They have a specific and unique color style, which is very distinct from what we did for the Klingons or the, um, or the Borg. And, and that, that was a lot of fun.

Tariq Malik [00:42:51]:
Oh, that's cool.

Rod Pyle [00:42:52]:
Well, and, and that actually leads to the next question I was going to ask. So, you know, we had the Klingons in the original series who basically look like sailors from the USSR with some dark makeup, right? You know, the striped shirts and everything. And then suddenly here comes the movie and the Klingons have evolved dramatically and with, you know, ruggedness on their foreheads and so forth. And then as Next Gen and the subsequent spin-offs matured, more and more we saw alphabets and we saw spaceship interiors and we saw personal quarters interiors, we saw variations of clothing, and culture began to actually build around this. And I assume most of that was you and your team. What were your inspirations for that? I mean, somebody comes along and says, okay, design something for the Wizima Woggies from the Planet X. Where do you start?

Michael Okuda [00:43:41]:
The Klingons are kind of an unusual circumstance because they— the Klingons go back to the original Star Trek, right? When they did Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Roddenberry very specifically wanted them to look much more alien than they were before. So there was, there was that dramatic break in the design, right? And for the— and for the Klingons, we were gonna, uh, we saw the— they had a, uh, a Klingon battlecruiser at the top of the of the show. I guess Trumbull was highly influential in that sequence so he specifically wanted it to look like a Japanese submarine that had been at sea for too long.

Rod Pyle [00:44:22]:
Wow.

Michael Okuda [00:44:23]:
That was a great look. When we did things, when I worked on Star Trek IV and then subsequently when we did the Klingon things for Next Generation, I specifically riffed off of what they did. I wanted it to look like it was in the same universe. For the various other alien cultures, most of them we invented from the look from whole cloth. It always starts with the writers. The evolution of the Klingons you spoke of came largely from Ron Moore, who fleshed out the Klingon warrior ethic and the High Council and all the machinations and made it a really rich culture. Similarly, we had a different look for the Romulans. For those, you try to start with what's on the page, you try to start with what is the culture.

Michael Okuda [00:45:24]:
Then again, given the time, the resources, are you likely to see them again? What's your budget? You go accordingly. One of the things that I did that I'm kind of fond of was the first time we saw the Borg, each of their cubicles had a a display screen behind the drone. I wanted to show that they were very different from what we had seen from other cultures. I had this wacky inspiration. I imagine you took a bowl of green spaghetti and dropped it on the ground and it splattered everywhere. That's the style. Then I tried to make it look like that meant something, that it was interconnected and it was telling you something important.

Tariq Malik [00:46:18]:
Oh, wow. I knew, I knew a guy, uh, who lived in the next town over who owned some of those alcoves, and he would have them on display and you could light them up and, and still—

Michael Okuda [00:46:27]:
that's awesome. Uh, was it the ones with the lightning or was it the ones with—

Tariq Malik [00:46:31]:
Yeah, yeah. So one of the, the later ones, plus the, the space dock from the, the first 2 movies too. He had the whole thing in his garage.

Rod Pyle [00:46:39]:
So cool. So, so I got just one quickie before our last break here. Um, Did you ever wish, and I know this wasn't specifically up to you, I guess, but did you ever wish that you could have aliens that weren't bipeds with 2 arms? You know, you could do something more like the Horta or like the Tholians or like Rocky from Project Hail Mary, you know, and really spend some time in a whole different kind of—

Michael Okuda [00:47:07]:
Absolutely. But that's always expensive. That's always difficult. So you can do it, but you do it in a very limited fashion. You do it so you see a couple of shots of that. Most of our aliens were designed by Mike Westmore, who is a freaking genius. If you've seen the alien prosthetics on the show, he's done amazing work.

Rod Pyle [00:47:34]:
It's pretty incredible what you could do with latex. Sometimes I wish they'd do something for my face.

Tariq Malik [00:47:39]:
You look marvelous, Rod.

Rod Pyle [00:47:40]:
We'll be right back. Thank you, Tarek. We'll be right back. So stay with us.

Tariq Malik [00:47:46]:
Well, Mike, you know, this has been a fascinating discussion, you know, for Trek. But you mentioned a few other kind of things earlier. You were talking about Ron Moore, and you also mentioned For All Mankind, which is another kind of a passion, I think, for me and a lot of folks that love that kind of real space look there. And I'm curious for our listeners, if you can kind of talk about that shift from this super futuristic franchise that is Star Trek, hundreds of years in the future, to taking a crack at what was once history, but giving a new spin on it. Because For All Mankind, for folks who may not be aware, is a bit of a retelling of the space race, and then it keeps going on by generation by generation, 20 years and 20 years. Until now, they've pretty much caught up to us almost in the current season. But what was that like? What was the ask in terms of, like, shaping some of those looks for the iconography and whatnot from, you know, an age where we have a lot of documentation to now and the future where things may have split off and gone a very different way?

Michael Okuda [00:48:59]:
For All Mankind is the most fun we've had on a series since we left Paramount. To be clear, we don't work in the art department. They, uh, uh, uh, the original production designer for the first few seasons was Dan Bishop, uh, then, and now it's Seth Reed. And he's, both of them have had some very talented, uh, graphic artists working for them who have done most of the, most of the things. Uh, I will contribute some things like if there's a specific story point we need to convey in a computer screen, I'll say what the diagram should do this. But we're mostly there as, as, as resident space geeks. And so it's a lot of fun. I mean, we sit, we sit there and we say, okay, okay, this, this controls the rotation of your ship.

Michael Okuda [00:49:49]:
This controls the, the translation back and forth. And the thing you're looking at is there. And then you should hit that button. A lot of times, in the early seasons especially, we'd have to study a lot to know, well, the controls for that are here. As the show progressed into the future, it came more into science fiction, but a lot of the controls are still kind of based on what they did in the shuttle. You still like, that's the rotation, that's That translation, that's your flight computer. And this shows the orientation of your ship. And so we try to maintain that.

Michael Okuda [00:50:43]:
It's— we just finished filming the final season. We're so excited. I did do a small number of graphics, but for the show when, when they got crunched. Uh, I'm very proud I designed this, the, uh, yeah, the patch for the Jamestown base, which was in the first, uh, first couple of seasons.

Tariq Malik [00:51:07]:
That was their moon base, everybody.

Rod Pyle [00:51:09]:
Well, and, and let's not overlook the fact that you've designed patches for specific NASA missions and programs as well, correct? And even an Apollo 1 patch.

Tariq Malik [00:51:20]:
It's the Hubble STS-125 patch.

Rod Pyle [00:51:22]:
That's beautiful. I mean, see, if I had managed to do just that, I could retire a happy guy, much less all the other stuff you did. Okay, now this one's important and I don't want to overlook it. Uh, a couple years before you, you took it on, I remember Paramount came to, uh, Gary Hutzel and said, hey, we're thinking of remastering—

Michael Okuda [00:51:44]:
I get—

Rod Pyle [00:51:45]:
I think it was after Trials and Tribulations, if I remember correctly. They were so impressed with the retransfer from the negatives that were used in that show from The Original Series, that they said, hey, you know, give us a bid on, on doing this for the entire run of The Original Series. Gary being Gary said, ah, just wait till they see this, you know. And it was a great big fat number, and the answer was no. But then eventually they did do it. And if I understand correctly, you were at the helm of that in a number of ways. And I think when I saw it, My feeling just personally was, okay, this is watchable for a new generation finally. Young people that look at the old ships and think, oh my God, they must be on shoestrings or something, can look at this and go, okay, this looks like a modern show.

Rod Pyle [00:52:31]:
What I really admired about it though was the restraint as much as anything else. It would have been very tempting to completely go overboard and become something that looked like a modern video game, but you didn't do that. You kept it very much within, I think, the ethos and the color palette and many other things that were part of what made the original series so special. Can you tell us about that experience and what you had to do to keep it on track?

Michael Okuda [00:53:01]:
Yeah, fairly early on, very early on, we were approached and we were told that CBS's desire was to freshen up the visual effects. I'm a huge fan of the original and I'm going, I'm not really interested in doing that. So we declined. Dave Rossi, who was really in charge of the project, he called us up and said, look, are you sure? I said, yeah, I'm pretty sure. Then I talked to him for half an hour and I said, but if you're gonna do it, Here's how I think you can respect the original, how you can make decisions to freshen up while still respecting the original as much as possible. I blathered for about half an hour and Dave listened patiently. Finally he said, look, Mike, if you feel that strongly about it, Come on board, otherwise shut up.

Rod Pyle [00:54:07]:
Well said.

Michael Okuda [00:54:08]:
Yeah. And for us, and for Dave too, it really was a passion project. They, uh, they, they paid us, but we put far more free hours into it. And it was, uh, it was one, one of those things. Uh, our friends from CBS Digital, uh, uh, Craig Weiss, uh, Neil Ray, uh, uh, Tony Pace, and their entire team, they They understood this was important. And, uh, they too were on a very tight budget, but they, they pushed it everywhere, every way they could.

Rod Pyle [00:54:40]:
Well, I, I think the first one I saw of, of the remasters was The Doomsday Machine. And even as a kid, it always bugged me that in a, in many of the passes of The Doomsday Machine— I'm sorry, my geek is showing here— that it was obviously kind of angled towards camera on the open end. You know, and it looked an awful lot like, uh, what'd they call those little corn treats? Called Bugles.

Tariq Malik [00:55:02]:
Yes.

Rod Pyle [00:55:02]:
I thought, well, that could have been done better. And sure enough, here you came along, and it— maybe it's unfair of the original guys to say it was done better because they were operating under really tough constraints.

Michael Okuda [00:55:13]:
The original optical effects were amazing.

Rod Pyle [00:55:16]:
They were brilliant for the time.

Michael Okuda [00:55:17]:
They were bleeding-edge visual effects technology for the time. But yes.

Rod Pyle [00:55:23]:
But you did it better.

Michael Okuda [00:55:25]:
We had better tools.

Rod Pyle [00:55:26]:
Yeah. Okay, that's fair.

Michael Okuda [00:55:30]:
When we first started that episode, that's one of the ones we did take more liberties with the original. Dave Rossi felt strongly, and I agreed, that it was appropriate to do it here. One of the first things we did is one of the effects artists at CBS Digital, wanted to update the look of the machine itself because we knew that Norman Spinrad wasn't happy with what was done.

Tariq Malik [00:56:03]:
Hmm.

Michael Okuda [00:56:04]:
So he came up with this beautiful Giger-esque thing and it was gorgeous. But I looked at it and I realized if we do that, we will be betraying people who have loved this for 40 years, or however many years it had been, uh, we need to be very close to the original. So, uh, this, this guy was—

Tariq Malik [00:56:30]:
yeah, he was quite disappointed, but, uh, I thought it was appropriate to keep the design of this really iconic machine that people had seen for Well, speaking of favorites, or treasures, I guess, of the franchise, I guess I have to ask if there is a specific episode or one of the films or a captain even, if there is something that really has been something that you always say is you know, this is my favorite of everything that I've either worked on or that I followed with this franchise, you know, overall, or something that you'd like to see them add in the future, right? Because we're here, we are 60 years on, and there's still shows on, right? We got another season of Starfleet Academy coming, of Strange New Worlds coming, you know, and hopefully more to come. I mean, is there something that they haven't done that you want to see too?

Michael Okuda [00:57:39]:
Well, to answer the first part of your question, what do I look back and think is special? For me, the Enterprise in Voyage Home, that was the first movie I worked on, the first Enterprise I worked on. I'm very proud of that bridge. Same thing with the Next Generation bridge, that was the first bridge for which the The interfaces were really mine.

Tariq Malik [00:58:04]:
Yeah.

Michael Okuda [00:58:06]:
As far as working on things, for both Denise and I, the DS9 episode Trials and Tribulations, where we revisited the original Star Trek series, was very, very near and dear to our hearts. That was probably the most fun we had working on Star Trek for that period of time. Yes, that's the one. Gary Hutzel took that picture, by the way.

Tariq Malik [00:58:28]:
Oh, did he? I have the double VHS box set of Trials and Tribulations, and it came with a little Tribble too. So—

Michael Okuda [00:58:37]:
Oh, cool.

Tariq Malik [00:58:39]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [00:58:39]:
Oh, Tarek, you're such a geek.

Tariq Malik [00:58:41]:
I know.

Michael Okuda [00:58:42]:
And then the, the, uh, a couple of years ago, I, I, uh, we continued to work on Star Trek-related projects including the Roddenberry Archive, uh, but, uh, Dave Blass, who was production designer on Star Trek: Picard called and said, would you like— he wants to get the band back together. And I don't know if you saw the start— the 3rd season of Star Trek: Picard, but we, uh, we did the, um, uh, we recreated, rebuilt from scratch the, uh, the Enterprise-D bridge. And, you know, they say you can't go home again, but just for a moment you could. Oh, it was so wonderful.

Rod Pyle [00:59:23]:
Well, and I just want to add a brief anecdote about Trials and Tribulations, which was an amazing episode. And again, Gary was just brilliant with the way he pulled that together. When it was over, we knew the bridge was going to be standing for, I don't know, I think 3 weeks or something after the episode was over. And I had worked up at the Griffith Observatory for about a decade back in the '70s and '80s. And I went up to the director and said, hey, You know, you've got this clear space in the East Gallery. It's about the same radius as the bridge, roughly. You know, bring it in here and put it on public display. And he got very excited, and we talked to the curator who kind of sneered at me and said, that's a ridiculous idea.

Rod Pyle [01:00:08]:
And therefore, the next thing I know, it had been broken up and gone into the trash, which was heartbreaking. Because personally, I would have loved to have seen the original shows, just a chunk of the bridge, you know, there would have been amazing. But you get what you can get.

Michael Okuda [01:00:24]:
The first time we rebuilt part of the Enterprise was in the Next Generation episode Relics. We built a little piece of the bridge and the helm console and things. And like that one, they left it standing for a while because in case they needed reshoots. But then there came a time where, okay, it's gonna be taken down next week. So I called around, I talked to anyone I could at the studio saying, let's save this. Let's— we can't save it, it's too much storage space. Can we donate it to a museum or lend it to a museum? Oh, no, we don't.

Tariq Malik [01:01:09]:
Okay.

Michael Okuda [01:01:11]:
I ran into all these brick walls and finally all I could think of, I was desperate to save this thing. Finally I called Majel Roddenberry. I said, Majel, we have this gorgeous set and it's gonna be destroyed. Is there something we can do? Maybe you can persuade them to give it to the Smithsonian. Finally Majel called, I don't know who she called, and then she called me back and she said, well, when I called, they suddenly decided, oh no, no, this is too valuable, we can't give this away. So they said no to her, but at least they did hold on to it. They then used it for a number of exhibitions and things, so people got to see it.

Tariq Malik [01:01:55]:
Well, that's funny.

Rod Pyle [01:01:56]:
That's a good bit of public service. Tarek, do you have anything else? Because I'm kind of up to my last question here. I mean, let me just say, I could talk for another hour, but he's got stuff to do.

Tariq Malik [01:02:05]:
I feel the same. I feel like I could just keep talking and asking you, you know, for your experience and your thoughts. You just, you're, you know, kind of the saving it, that reminds me that, you know, just about a few hours north of me, you can actually go and visit a recreation of that original bridge as like a tourist destination over up in upstate New York.

Michael Okuda [01:02:29]:
Oh, in fact, we're We're going there next week. They have, they have the original shuttlecraft Galileo, uh, uh, uh, mock-up. So we're going there next week for the dedication. Oh wow. Star Trek: The Original Series set tour, Ticonderoga, New York. Be there.

Tariq Malik [01:02:45]:
Exactly. Okay, so you heard it here, and now I know that that's happening, and so I have to look into that because, yeah, uh, Adam Schneider, the, the friend that I, I mentioned earlier who, uh, used to live over here at the next town over, um, You know, was the one that found that original Galileo shuttlecraft out in the open, I think, and had it restored at a boatworks over here in southern Jersey.

Michael Okuda [01:03:10]:
They did a gorgeous job.

Tariq Malik [01:03:11]:
Yeah, and we got to go see it. And then it went off to Johnson Space Center. And I was heartbroken when I went there and it had already moved from there to, I think it was at the Sci-Fi Museum for a bit or another location. And now it's over at the Experience. And so that's really exciting to see. So yeah, maybe, maybe I can get up there. It's gonna be a long drive for me, but that's exciting.

Michael Okuda [01:03:35]:
So come up. It'd be good to meet you in person.

Tariq Malik [01:03:39]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [01:03:40]:
Yeah, tariqspace.com will fly me out too, right?

Tariq Malik [01:03:42]:
Exactly. Yes.

Rod Pyle [01:03:44]:
Snark, snark. So Mike, I guess my last question is, you know, you spent a long time in the Star Trek universe. You worked on these other shows. You worked on For All Mankind, you worked on others, and I'm sure for the time, you know, you have to spend a lot of time sort of falling back into your imagination to bring together these things that you do and give them the proper presentation. While you're doing that, I imagine, and also reading science fiction and so forth, you have some thoughts about the future. And the way we often talk about it at the National Space Society where I work. You know, most people want to think of a Star Trek future, but there are some of us that think, well, you know, given human nature and how slowly evolution works and all that, watch The Expanse because you might get an idea of, of how things could also go. What are your thoughts, the big picture?

Michael Okuda [01:04:38]:
Roddenberry used to say, uh, that it's not necessar— these aren't his exact words— it's not necessarily a straight line from today to Star Trek. That you go 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, go to the side a little bit. You look at his series concept Genesis 2, it's what happened after the nuclear apocalypse. And yet even there, it was a hopeful, optimistic show that these good people are working to make tomorrow better. And the original Star Trek was made in the '60s when we were terrified of nuclear apocalypse. We were terrified of environmental catastrophe. We were shattered by racial strife and international conflict and famine around the world. And Star Trek said at the time, we can do better.

Michael Okuda [01:05:37]:
We can make good choices and, and, and that it won't necessarily all be over. And I think that's the thing that I try not to lose sight of.

Tariq Malik [01:05:52]:
Yeah.

Rod Pyle [01:05:53]:
Well, I think we've all enjoyed this, uh, most of an hour at the feet of the master. And I want to thank everyone for joining us for episode 227 that we'd like to call Trekmania. Uh, Mike, where's the best place for us to keep up to date with you and Denise's current projects? And are there any books or projects we should know about coming up?

Michael Okuda [01:06:14]:
We try to be active on social media and Facebook and such things. We're putting a lot of energy into a project called the Roddenberry Archive. That's roddenberry.x.io. And of course, we are— that's the one. And we're still working on post-production for For All Mankind. So when that returns, please, uh, uh, please take a look. However, if you've not seen For All Mankind before, don't start with the last season. Start with the beginning.

Michael Okuda [01:06:42]:
It's an amazing ride. I, I think it's worth it. I hope you enjoy it.

Rod Pyle [01:06:47]:
Fantastic. Tarek, where can we find you trekking these days?

Tariq Malik [01:06:50]:
Well, you can find me at space.com as always, and, uh, uh, on social media at Tarek J. Malik. Uh, you can find me if you like video games at— on YouTube at Spacetron Plays. We got 2 new Star Trek games coming in the, in the months ahead, and I'm really, really excited for it.

Rod Pyle [01:07:10]:
And there's his commercial, ladies and gentlemen. And mine is, you can always find me at pilebooks.com or at astromagazine.com, where I hang out and edit our print quarterly. Finally, remember, you can always drop us a line at twist@twit.tv. We welcome your comments, suggestions, and ideas, and space jokes. But don't send us any Star Trek questions because we won't know what to say. You have to send that to the Okudas. New episodes of this podcast publish every Friday on your favorite podcatcher, so make sure to subscribe, tell your friends, and give us reviews. We'll take 5 stars, 5 thumbs up, 5 Klingons, whatever you got.

Rod Pyle [01:07:43]:
And don't forget to join Club Twit because that's how you show your love to this show and our beloved network. Finally, you can follow the Twit Tech Podcast Network @twit on Twitter and on Facebook and Twitter. Mike, I, I, from me and from Tarek and from the people on the feed who are just really digging this, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for making time for us. We really appreciate it. I know it's been a busy week because this is the big 60th anniversary.

Michael Okuda [01:08:10]:
It's been a crazy week.

Rod Pyle [01:08:11]:
No, I bet you got things to do, but I appreciate you coming on.

Tariq Malik [01:08:14]:
Thank you so much.

Michael Okuda [01:08:15]:
Thank you for having me. It's been fun.

Rod Pyle [01:08:18]:
Live long and prosper, my friend.

Michael Okuda [01:08:20]:
And you. Thank you.