star trek opening lines space final frontier

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• To boldly go where no man has gone before

What's the origin of the phrase 'To boldly go where no man has gone before'?

This introductory text was spoken at the beginning of many Star Trek television episodes and films, from 1966 onward:

Space: The final frontier These are the voyages of the Starship, Enterprise Its 5 year mission To explore strange new worlds To seek out new life and new civilizations To boldly go where no man has gone before

This line reinvigorated the last-lasting debate over split infinitives. These are infinitives that have an adverb between ‘to’ and the verb. Those grammarians who still cared about this in the 1960s complained that ‘to boldly go’ should have been ‘to go boldly’. The debate had been simmering on and off for the best part of a century. As early as 1897, Academy magazine suggested that an insistence that split infinitives were incorrect was somewhat pedantic:

“Are our critics aware that Byron is the father of their split infinitive? ‘To slowly trace’, says the noble poet, ‘the forest’s shady scene’.”

Most authorities now accept Star Trek into the grammatical fold and no longer care, or at least rarely publicly complain, about ‘to boldly go’.

By 1966, people cared more about implied sexism than doubtful grammar and the show’s producers received criticism for the ‘no man’ part of the speech. Despite some recourse to the tradition defence of the use of ‘man’ to mean ‘human’, that is, ‘man embraces woman’, by the time Star Trek: The Next Generation was aired, in 1987, the shows producers had opted for the more politically correct last line – “Where no one has gone before”. In that series the hirsutely challenged Patrick Stewart took on the role of the Star Trek’s commander and wags could hardly miss the ‘to baldly go’ quip at his expense.

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Source: Star Trek

Speaker: Narrator

"Space, the final frontier."

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

This memorable quote is from the introduction to Star Trek: The Original Series (1966-69).

When the starship Enterprise set off on its five-year voyage in 1964 (or the 23rd century, but who's counting?) it was introduced to America with a brief monologue before each episode, one that inspired a generation of geeks…er, nerds…um, Trekkies to dream of "Space, the final frontier" and hope "to boldly go where no man has gone before."

That original voyage might have only lasted three years instead of a planned five, but the franchise still boldly goes new places today.

Where you've heard it

You hear this line any time someone references space travel , Star Trek, or basically any sci-fi at all.

Also, your English teacher loves to use "to boldly go" as an example of a split infinitive.  Star Trek is proof that everyone's grammar will be terrible in the 23rd century.

Pretentious Factor

If you were to drop this quote at a dinner party, would you get an in-unison "awww" or would everyone roll their eyes and never invite you back? Here it is, on a scale of 1-10.

There's something inherently pretentious about space travel, and calling it "the final frontier" makes it kind of even more pretentious. We all know what happened to American Indians when settlers started exploring that frontier. Martians, beware.

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W hy's T his F unny?

TNG: Opening Credits Monologue

Quick navigation:, opening credits monologue.

"Space... The final frontier... These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: To explore strange new worlds... To seek out new life; new civilisations... To boldly go where no one has gone before!"           -- Jean-Luc Picard, Captain, Starship Enterprise; NCC-1701D

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier ( Paramount Pictures , 1989 ) is the fifth feature film based on the popular Star Trek science fiction television series . The titular "Final Frontier" refers to transcending the boundaries of our universe, and into the realm of God , truly where no man has gone before.

Dialogue [ edit ]

Cast [ edit ], external links [ edit ].

• Star Trek V: The Final Frontier quotes at the Internet Movie Database
• Star Trek V: The Final Frontier at StarTrek.com

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• Dr. McCoy : "He's dead, Jim."
• [ Opening narration ]
• Capt. Kirk : Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
• Scotty : When are ya gonna get off of that milk diet Laddy? Now Scotch is a real drink for a man.
• Chekov : Scotch was invented by a little old lady from Leningrad.
• Capt. Kirk : All right, you mutinous, disloyal, computerized half-breed. We'll see about you deserting my ship.
• Spock : The term "half-breed" is somewhat applicable, but "computerized" is inaccurate. A machine can be computerized, not a man.
• Capt. Kirk : What makes you think you're a man? You're an overgrown jackrabbit. An elf with a hyperactive thyroid.
• Spock : Jim, I don't understand...
• Capt. Kirk : Of course you don't understand. You don't have the brains to understand. All you have is printed circuits.
• Spock : Captain, if you will excuse me.
• [ Tries to activate the transporter ]
• Capt. Kirk : [ blocks Spock's way and interupts ] What can you expect from a simpering, devil-eared freak whose father was a computer and his mother an encyclopedia.
• Spock : My mother was a teacher. My father an ambassador.
• Capt. Kirk : Your father was a computer, like his son. An ambassador from a planet of traitors. The Vulcan never lived who had an ounce of integrity...
• Spock : Captain, please don't...
• Capt. Kirk : You're a traitor from a race of traitors. Disloyal to the core. Rotten! Like the rest of your subhuman race. And you've got the GALL... to make love to that girl!
• Spock : That's enough.
• Capt. Kirk : Does she know what she's getting, Spock? A carcass full of memory banks who should be squatting on a mushroom? Instead of passing himself off as a man? You belong in the circus, Spock, not a starship. Right next to the dog face boy!
• [ Spock begins beating the stew out of Kirk - he picks up a stool, ready to hit Kirk, then stops - the spore's influence is gone ]
• Capt. Kirk : Had enough? I never realized what it took to get under that thick hide of yours. Anyhow, I don't know what you're so mad about. It isn't every first officer who gets to belt his captain... several times.
• Spock : You did that to me deliberately.
• Capt. Kirk : Believe me, Mr. Spock. It was painful. In more ways than one.
• [ Grabs his hurting arm ]
• Spock : The spores. They're gone. I don't belong anymore.
• Capt. Kirk : You said they were benevolent and peaceful. Violent emotions overwhelm them, destroy them. I had to make you angry enough to shake off their influence. That's the answer, Mr. Spock.
• Spock : That may be correct, Captain, but trying to initiate a brawl with over 500 crewmen and colonists is hardly logical.
• Capt. Kirk : I had something else in mind. Can you put together a subsonic transmitter? Something we can hook into the communication station and broadcast over the communicators?
• Spock : It can be done.
• Capt. Kirk : Good. Let's get to work.
• Spock : Captain! Striking a fellow officer is a court-martial offense.
• Capt. Kirk : Well, if we're both in the brig, who's gonna build the subsonic transmitter?
• Spock : That is quite logical, Captain.
• Capt. Kirk : You'd make a splendid computer, Mr Spock. Spock
• Spock : [ taken aback ] That is very kind of you, Captain!
• [ repeated line ]
• James T. Kirk : Beam me up, Scotty. - This line was never actually spoken in the television series.
• Dr. McCoy : I'm a doctor, not an engineer.
• James T. Kirk : There seems to be no sign of intelligent life anywhere...
• Capt. Kirk : There's no such thing as the unknown- only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood.
• Dr. McCoy : The next thing you'll know, I'll be talking to myself.
• Chekov : A madman got us into this, and it's beginning to look like only a madman can get us out.
• Spock : Facinating
• Uhura : Bridge to Captain Kirk!
• Capt. Kirk : Kirk, here.

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Warning: SPOILERS for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Episode 1 - "Strange New Worlds"

Paramount+ released the opening titles of  Star Trek: Strange New Worlds , making Captain Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) the 12th character to recite Star Trek's famous introduction. A prequel set in the years before Star Trek: The Original Series , Strange New Worlds chronicles Pike's voyages as Captain of the Starship Enterprise . Indeed, Strange New Worlds also brings back the classic Star Trek episodic format where the Enterprise will travel to a new planet and solve a different problem each episode. As evidenced by Strange New Worlds ' opening titles , the series thrillingly evokes the classic Star Trek nostalgia while updating the Starship Enterprise for modern audiences.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds literally lifts its title from Star Trek's world-renowned introduction, which may be the most famous mission statement in pop culture: "Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before." As of Star Trek: The Next Generation , the more inclusive "no one" replaced "no man" in the mantra, and there have been other slight variations depending on who recites it. But by the time Captain Pike gets his turn at reciting Star Trek's introduction, he becomes the dozenth member of the Starship Enterprise to bring "Space, the final frontier..." to life.

Related: Strange New Worlds Can Finally Show How Kirk Met Spock In Star Trek Canon

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' opening credits happily features Captain Pike uttering the famous intro, which is accompanied by a new version of Alexander Courage's classic Star Trek theme music composed by Jeff Russo. Beyond igniting amazing nostalgia, it also hammers home that Strange New Worlds is the classic Star Trek reborn. Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) opened every episode of Star Trek: The Original Series with "Space, the final frontier..."  From 1966 to 1982, Kirk was the only one to recite Star Trek's mission statement until Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan when Spock (Leonard Nimoy)  delivered the famous speech (with slight wording variations) after the Vulcan's death. Interestingly, Shatner's Kirk never said "Space, the final frontier..." in any Star Trek movie he starred in although his closing speech in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country ended with his acknowledgment of "where no one has gone before."

Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) made "Space, the final frontier..." his own for seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation , but, surprisingly, Picard never gave the famous speech in any of the TNG movies. In 2005, Captain Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula) got to join his fellow Enterprise Captains, Picard and Kirk, in the series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise , "These Are The Voyages," but Archer only got to say the last line, "To boldly go where no man has gone before," leading into  Star Trek: Enterprise's  cancelation .

In the Kelvin timeline of J.J. Abrams' Star Trek movie trilogy, the mission statement was used to close out Star Trek 2009 and Star Trek Beyond , reaffirming the mission of the Starship Enterprise (and Enterprise-A). Star Trek 2009 ended with Leonard Nimoy's Ambassador Spock reciting "Space, the final frontier..." for the second time in a movie (making Nimoy's Spock the only character to do so). 2016's Star Trek Beyond touchingly ended with the entire main cast, including Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), Dr. Bones McCoy (Karl Urban), Sulu (John Cho), Scotty (Simon Pegg), Chekov (Anton Yelchin), and Uhura (Zoe Saldana) taking turns reciting the legendary lines.

In Star Trek: Strange New Worlds , Captain Pike fittingly joins this storied list of some of the greatest Star Trek icons to deliver the words every Trekker wants to hear in a Star Trek show or movie about the Enterprise. Pike is also the first Captain to deliver the fabled mantra to his crew to describe the Enterprise's five-year mission - and Cadet Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) is right that it's "cool."  It's a definitive statement that the Starship Enterprise and the feeling of classic Star Trek are indeed back to boldly go where no one has gone before.

Next: Strange New Worlds Retcons The Enterprise's Star Trek Role

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds  premieres Thursday, May 5th, 2022, on Paramount+.

• SR Originals
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (2022)

The Final Frontier: History, Science, and Space Exploration

Published by sarah handley-cousins on december 9, 2018 december 9, 2018.

Is space the new frontier? What are the links between the so-called “age of exploration,” and the conquering of the American West, and the United States space program? We will be covering those questions and others in today’s podcast, The Final Frontier: History, Science, and Space Exploration.

Listen, download, watch on YouTube , or scroll down for the transcript.

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Transcript  for: The Final Frontier: History, Science, and Space Exploration

Written and researched by Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD

Produced by Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD and Averill Earls, PhD

Ave: Space … the final frontier …

Sarah: That’s right for this installment of our FRONTIERS episode, we’re metaphorically climbing aboard the Starship Enterprise to explore the vast reaches of the galaxy – okay, fine, we’re not actually exploring outer space. We’re not exactly qualified for that.

Averill: Yeah, we’re humanities profs. You’ll have to get all that STEM stuff elsewhere.

Sarah: What we’re actually talking about today was, however, inspired by Captain James T. Kirk’s famous opening lines in that beloved television and film series, Star Trek. Is space the new frontier? What are the links between the so-called “age of exploration,” and the conquering of the American West, and the United States space program?

And I’m Averill!

And we are your historians for this episode of DIG

Sarah: Before we get started, we want to extend a major thank you to Anna Reser , one of the amazing historians of Lady Science – a magazine and podcast devoted to issues of gender, science, and technology. Anna is working on a PhD right now on the history of the American space program, and helped me out SO MUCH in locating the readings for this episode. We’re relying largely on one book: Space in the American Imagination by Howard McCurdy, on Anna’s recommendation. Thanks, Anna!

Sarah: We don’t think about imagination all that much as historians – we think about what people thought, and what they believed, but at least in my work, I don’t often think about what people might have imagined. But our imagination is actually incredibly important to how we decide to shape our society. For instance, there was a time in the United States when most people – most white people, anyway – believed that slavery was just part of the fabric of society. It was just so baked in that many people couldn’t really fathom that there might be a different way. How did that start to change? Well, one element, argues Howard McCurdy, was that abolitionist literature, including novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped people to imagine something different. In other words, fiction and pop culture help people to envision an alternate universe. With the help of these imagination aids, they could suddenly see not only the horrible realities of bondage, but also a future that did not include the enslavement of black Americans.

Averill: As McCurdy argues, “no policy can long exist in a political culture in which popular beliefs and myths question its feasibility.” In other words, if it seems utterly absurd to us, then it’s not possible for some visionary changemaker to go out and implement some policy that will change the world – it’s doomed to fail. Another example McCurdy gives is laws to alleviate poverty. For a long time – centuries?- most people believed that poverty was impossible to fix. Some people were poor, some people were rich – why bother helping poor people? (Ebenezer Scrooge!) But when the works of Charles Dickens, for instance, started to show people that impoverished people were just like them, with families and hopes and dreams, it helped average people to believe that maybe policies meant to fix poverty could do something worthwhile.

Thomas Cole, Sunny Morning on the Hudson River, 1827 | Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

Averill: This sort of reminds me of gay characters on television…

Sarah: Anyway. This process of learning how to imagine something unimaginable was also central to the movement to establish an American space program the middle of the 20 th century. Without getting the public to believe that space travel might be possible, and to imagine what wonders might be beyond our atmosphere, there would be no public support for an incredibly expensive and time-consuming government program that added nothing concrete to average Americans lives. Space “boosters” used popular magazines and influenced the creation of other cultural products, such as science fiction books, magazines, comics, movies and television shows, to help Americans to envision a space program. Now, I want to pause here just to say that this is a tricky process – sometimes so-called space ‘boosters,’ or folks who really wanted to see space exploration get funding and support, actually created this content. (Examples to follow.) Other times, they acted as expert consultants, or helped content creators to create shows or movies; still other times, they just sort of set the stage for cultural content. That was especially common later in the 20 th century as the space program got underway in earnest – screenwriters often looked to the realities of the space program for material, even without the urging of individual ‘boosters.’

Averill: In fact, some of the ‘fathers’ of modern space exploration were themselves inspired by science fiction. Robert Goddard, the American engineer who built the first liquid-fueled rocket and the man for whom the NASA Goddard Space Flight center is named for; Hermann Oberth, the German physicist, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the Russian rocket scientist, were all fans of Jules Verne. Verne, of course, was the mid 19 th c. French novelist who wrote science-inspired fiction (science fiction? Science “romances” or scientific adventures) such as Around the World in Eighty Days, From the Earth to the Moon, Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea . Verne wrote what at first glance seemed like fanciful adventures, but they were actually based on some scientific research, and he took great pains to make his adventures seem plausible. For instance, in From the Earth to the Moon, he calculated the velocity that would be needed to launch his characters to the moon. Where science hadn’t yet progressed, he just used his imagination to spice up technology already existed – for instance, he had his characters travel to the moon in a rocket that was launched by a gigantic cannon.

Hermann Oberth in the 1950s | Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

Sarah: Hermann Oberth was born in 1894, and grew up on a steady diet of Verne’s space stories, reading them “five or six times” until he “finally knew them by heart.” Oberth went on to study mathematics and physics, earned a PhD, and spent his life trying to solve the problem space flight. In 1923, he published a book called (in English) The Rocket in Planetary Space , which was an interesting blend of complex scientific theories and imaginative, creative ideas about what humans could do once in space. It was a huge hit, and just a few years later, Oberth acted as a consultant on the film By Rocket to the Moon , a Fritz Lang film about space travel that was based on his theories. Lang was an incredibly famous filmmaker – for context, he had just come off of Metropolis, one of the first feature length science fiction films ever, which was vastly ambitious and is still considered incredibly important in film history. Such literature and films about space helped to spread the idea that space exploration might actually be possible – and since they were based on real scientific research, they weren’t pure fantasy. As a result, during the period roughly after WWI through to the 1950s, societies began to form with the intent of advocating for space exploration.

Averill: There’s another reason why excitement for space travel began to grow: people began to believe that the earth no longer held place for exploration. Sarah did an episode during our last series all about polar exploration – arctic exploration was full of adventure and danger, and was just the kind of thing that newspaper loved to publish because it brought in readers. But arctic exploration was more or less out because in 1905, Roald Amundsen finally discovered a Northwest Passage. Even before that, the major European quests to explore the Africa had ended, such as Henry Stanley’s trip down the Congo River in 1877. Increasingly, people believed that there weren’t any more frontiers – space seemed like the it might be the last remaining unexplored territory.

(Sarah, side note: this is really not true – as SeaQuest tried to show us in the 1990s, and Blue Planet again in the 2000s, we really do not know very much about the oceans! Of course, the Yukon, and Himalayas, and South Pole, and etc etc. And also, there are some very strange explorations of the Amazon in the 1910s, including one very ill-fated one that Teddy Roosevelt went on in 1913-1914.)

Wernher von Braun’s moonships as painted by Chesley Bonstell for Collier’s, 1952 | Flickr CC-BY-SA

Sarah: The Collier’s series led to another way boosters were able to sell the idea of space exploration: through the power of Disney. Walt Disney was in the final stages of planning Disneyland. The park was going to be organized around four

Still of Wernher von Braun in the Disney short film, “Man in Space,” March 9, 1955 | Fair Use

themed sections: Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantastyland, and Tomorrowland. Most of those themes were fairly well fleshed out … except for Tomorrowland. Disney also planned to release a television series to promote park, but the Tomorrowland segments were causing the writing team problems. One of Disney’s senior animators, Ward Kimball, had followed the Collier’s series closely, and reached out to the boosters behind that series – writer Willy Ley, aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, and physicist Heinz Haber. The result was an impressive combination of animation, real footage, and science instruction. It’s really something else – I’ll link to it in the show notes – but it combines both the concrete reality of the technology that scientists already have, what they’re experimenting on, and what’s possible down the road. It’s a combination of science and imagination – but with practicality. It’s futuristic, but not fantastical. Wernher von Braun actually states on the show that :If we were to start today on an organized and well-supported space program, I believe a practical passenger rocket could be built and tested within ten years.” He was creepily accurate. The first three-stage rocket with astronauts on board launched just thirteen years later.

Averill: But that’s not all that came of the collaboration between Disney and the space boosters. They did produce several more installments about space travel between 1955 to 1957, but they also collaborated on the actual rides in the Tomorrowland park at Disneyland. The park was supposed to depict America in the year 1986 (although there were no crimpers or acid wash jeans or leg warmers in sight). In the center of the park was an 80 foot tall needle-nosed rocket ship, which had been designed under the direction of Ley and von Braun. As visitors moved through the park, they viewed a short film about space travel, then entered room that was supposed to be the inside of the rocket, where screens on the floor and walls made it seem as though they were traveling through space. Later that year, Disney added a model space station on the recommendation of Ley and von Braun, where visitors could “look down” on the planet earth and watch the United States go from dawn to dusk.

Sarah: If you’ve ever seen Star Trek, you know that the original series is essentially an extended allegory on the Cold War: the Federation represents the NATO countries, while the Klingons are the dangerous, chaotic, uncivilized Soviets. And if you know anything about the development of the United States program during the mid 20 th century, you know that it was, in large part, sped along by the ‘space race’ against the Soviet Union. But it wasn’t a simple process. Dwight Eisenhower, hero of World War II and president in the 1950s, endorsed space travel, but wasn’t sold on sending humans into space for scientific exploration. First, he was worried about the continued growth of what he famously termed “the military industrial complex,” but he also worried that it was a waste of money and resources. Instead, he wanted the newly established National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to concentrate on satellite technology, especially after the Soviets launched Sputnik 1 in October of 1957. NASA did not focus exclusively on satellite technology as Eisenhower hoped, and continued to research what they called “manned” space travel, but also found that during this time of heightened national security concerns, it wasn’t good enough to sell the program using Disney magic. Now, space travel had to appear to be as key to winning the Cold War.

Averill: Space, and the moon in particular, suddenly became the “high ground” of the Cold War – this is referring to the law in military science that it’s tactically important to hold the ground.  In a 1946 issue of Collier’s , writer G. Edward Pendray wrote: “So far as sovereign power is concerned … control of the moon in the interplentary world of the atomic future could mean military control of our whole portion of the solar system. Its dominance could include not only the earth but also Mars and Venus, the two other possibly habitable planets.” Pendray went further, saying that “the Moon may be the fortress of the next conqueror of the Earth.” Soon, outlets were reporting that the moon was a potential launch site for nuclear weapons, stoking fears rather than exciting imaginations. Eisenhower was not excited about this, because it seemed to point the space program in the direction he most resisted – potential weaponization, and manned space flight – but in the end, it was his successor, John F. Kennedy, who shaped the American space program. By 1965, NASA’s budget had increased tenfold to a whopping $5.3 billion, with the goal a rocket with people in it to the moon.

Sarah: I want to come back to a quote that you mentioned, Averill, from science fiction writer G. Edward Pendray. Pendray explicitly referred to the conquest of space, which is a particularly telling word choice. Our series here is on frontiers, and as students of history, we know that often, the exploration of new lands and frontiers involves the conquest or colonization of those places and the peoples that inhabit them. And space boosters often linked space exploration with the “age of exploration,” or the period in roughly the 1400-1600s where Europeans were increasingly interested in ocean exploration. For example, a comic book made with the support of NASA to explain space flight to children explained that space exploration was basically the same thing as Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the “new world.” It read: “Just as Christopher dreamed about opening a new trade route to the Far East, we can dream about a clean and beautiful Earth, about other space routes to Mars and colonization of our neighbor, the Moon.” I think that quote’s even more telling, because not only does it invoke Columbus, but also refers to the colonization of the moon – because after all, the explorers weren’t exploring solely for the sake of science, but for the establishment of empires.

“Pioneering the Space Frontier,” 1986 | Public Domain / The Internet Archive

Averill: Oh, but that’s not the only Columbus reference. In 1986, the National Commission on Space issued a report to describe the goals of space exploration in the 21 st century, they opened with this: “Five centuries after Columbus opened access to “The New World” we can initiate the settlement of worlds beyond our plant of birth. The promise of virgin lands and the opportunity to live in freedom brought our ancestors to the shoes of North America. Now space technology has freed humankind to move outward from Earth as a species destined to expand to other worlds.” The same report featured an image of several astronaut in futuristic gear, watching in the distance as a rocket blasts of from what appears to be a space station. In the black space above the image are the words: “Pioneering the Space Frontier.” Of course, the word “pioneer” there is supposed to evoke something for Americans. Our pioneers were the men and women who courageously traveled across the great expanses of the Midwest to settle unknown territories – the heroes that we grew up with from Little House on the Prairie and Oregon Trail.

Sarah: Side note: after I had my first baby, several doctors and nurses and pediatricians told my husband that both me and our baby were “pioneer stock” because I was apparently good at having babies? And Ainsley was super healthy and learned how to nurse really fast, I guess. James still says I’m “upstate New York farm stock”

Sarah: It wasn’t just Columbus. NASA administrator James Begs said that Americans had always been driven to “chart new paths.” “That instinct,” he said, “drove Lewis and Clark to press across the uncharted continent. It guided Admirals Peary and Byrd to the icy wastes of the poles. It drove Lindbergh alone non-stop across the Atlantic and sustained twelve Americans as they walked on the moon. If we ever lose this urge to know the unknown, we would no longer be a great nation.” I find this last phrase absolutely fascinating, because it sounds like a space-age version of something that all American historians are familiar with: the work of Frederick Jackson Turner. Frederick Jackson Turner (historical hottie, btw) was a American historian working at during the Gilded Age/Progressive Era. He earned a PhD from Johns Hopkins, then went on to work and teach at the University of Wisconsin and later, Harvard University. Turner is most remembered now for a lecture that he gave at the meeting of the American Historical Association at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The paper he delivered was called The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” and it argued that the existence of a frontier was critical to the development of the American character. The shortest version is that as American pioneers moved across the continent, they became less and less European in their character and more democratic. Part of this theory is that the further they got from the ‘civilization’ of the East Coast, the more that American character intensified, to the point where people in the far west were wild, more violent, more individualistic, and generally more ‘savage.’ But the core of Turner’s thesis, and the part that stuck in the American imagination, was the idea that frontiers were critical to the exceptional American character. Without a frontier, what would set Americans apart? When James Begs said that without the urge to explore the unknown, “we would no longer be a great nation,” he was applying the Turner thesis to space exploration.

Frederick Jackson Turner c. 1890 | Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

Averill: There’s another part of Turner’s thesis that sunk into the popular mindset: Turner argued that the frontier closed in 1890. The 1890 census showed that most large tracts of land, or what constituted the ‘frontier’ according to Turner, had been broken up – by what, you ask? Why, barbed wire. Barbed wire allowed ranchers to divide their land, meaning that the ‘frontier’ was broken up into individual plots rather than open space. Turner’s theory was not only that frontier had been critical to the creation of the American character, but that the lack of a frontier was foreboding for America’s future. What would become a people forged by frontier when the frontier disappeared? Turner wasn’t alone in his worries about this – Teddy Roosevelt had his own, similar, theory about the frontier and the American character, except his was a bit more violent. He believed that it wasn’t just moving West, but conquering the west. Americans had become a powerful, masterful (read: masculine) society by taking the western lands from Native Americans by force. Now that the frontier was closed, and the major conflicts with tribes like the Lakota and Cheyenne were over, there was no one left to conquer in the United States, and Roosevelt worried that the American character would become soft and effeminate. He does suggest that maybe we can solve this problem with football and hunting, but eventually suggests, in his famous Strenuous Life speech, that what we need is to conquer other lands and peoples – in other words, join European nations in establishing an empire. Roosevelt, of course, had his eye on places like Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. In other words, the essence of the American character that needs to frontier to remain vital can be saved as long as we keep finding new places to explore and conquer.

Sarah: So this is what is so fascinating to me about the use of Turner’s thesis in space boosterism is that is often includes this second idea – that Americans were made to conquer. G. Edward Pendray’s warning that the moon could potentially be the launch site of “the next conqueror of Earth” has really strong parallels to the rhetoric of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era language about colonization. If we don’t act now to get involved in Cuba, Teddy Roosevelt was saying in 1899, some other European nation is going to outstrip us. In the 1950s, the implication was that if Americans didn’t act fast to control the moon, someone else was going to get there first, with potentially devastating consequences. It also translates into increasing discussion of not just exploring space, or traveling through space, but colonizing space using moon bases. In the 1960s, NASA organized several studies on the creation of Moon bases. The Apollo program (the NASA initiative to put a man on the moon) was seen as sort of the first step in what would, inevitably for some, be a project to establish a permanent presence on the moon. One suggestion was to place a module on the moon with enough supplies for astronauts to live for about 90 days, with more permanent shelters following. By the late 1980s, NASA theorized, there could be a permanent colony living on the moon. This never happened, of course – but we’ll get to why toward the end of the episode.

Averill: Others had even more ambitious plans. Gerard O’Neill, a physics professor, started brainstorming space colonization with his students at Princeton University in the early 1970s. Eventually, he published his ideas in an article for Physics Today . His plan included long tubes, 16 miles long and 4 miles in diameter, that would replicate Earth’s environment but floating in the emptiness of space. Animals and humans would live together, just like on Earth – just without bugs. Within a few decades, he argued, these colonies could house up to 1.2 billion people. O’Neil’s visions led to the creation of a new wave of space booster organizations like the L-5 Society. The L-5 society took its name from the location in between the Earth and the moon L-5 (or Langragian 5) where, if a small object existed, would stay put on that orbital path, kept stable by the gravitational pull of the two larger bodies (the Earth and the moon). The group was devoted to O’Neill’s vision of space colonization, and actually had a little bit of political influence in the late 1970s when, to make a long story short, they helped to convince the United States Senate not to ratify the so-called Moon Treaty, which would have made the moon an internationally recognized neutral entity … in other words, it would have made it illegal under international law for one state to colonize the moon or the moon’s orbit. L5 wanted to see O’Neil’s floating space colony become a reality, so they did not want the Moon Treaty to be ratified – if it did, it would make space colonization much less likely. The L5 society wasn’t alone, though: McCurdy argues that actually the cancellation of Star Trek in 1969, which had help to stoke the space-imaginations of thousands of Americans, made people flood into space-booster organizations to help their space fantasies become reality. By 1980, there were about 40 organizations all devoted to space exploration or colonization, all ready to help be ‘space boosters.’ They actually had some clout, too – in the late 1970s, a letter writing campaign from Trekkies helped to convince Gerald Ford to name a test shuttle Enterprise.

The shuttle Enterprise | Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

Sarah: The Turnerian vision of space as frontier took a different form in the mind of Carl Sagan, the famous scientist and writer. Sagan was immensely talented on a number of levels, but he was particularly talented at translating complex scientific principles into ideas that average people could understand – much in the same way that I think Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye is today. In 1980, Sagan hosted the 13 part PBS series Cosmos, which (much like those Disney films of the 1950s) blended scientific instruction with animation to explain outer space and space exploration to average people. Because of Cosmos, Sagan really became a public intellectual with an incredible following. In 1994, he published his second-to-last book, Pale Blue Dot : A Vision of the Human Future in Space . In Pale Blue Dot, Sagan made a very Turnerian argument: that humans were, at their core, wanders. Humans had been wandering when they cross the Bering Strait to populate North America, and they’d been wandering when they crossed the Atlantic for the first time, and they’d been wandering when the pioneers crossed the American plains in covered wagons. But in recent human history, he argued, we lost our wandering spirit. He wrote: “For all its material advantages, “the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled” while “the open road still softly calls, like a forgotten song.”

Averill: As Sagan builds this theory, he sounds more and more like a science fiction Frederick Jackson Turner. This urge to explore is a survival instinct, he suggests, something that we’re compelled to do as a part of our Darwinian nature. So, he says, we’ve hemmed ourselves in, and all the while, something inside of us is aching to get back out on the road and wander. At the same time, Sagan also muses that humanity is suffering from something like growing pains, or maybe ‘maturing’ pains. For most of human existence humans created cosmologies to explain the universe to themselves, and to give them comfort that all of this added up to something, or had a large meaning – to use a Christian interpretation, that God created all of what we know and see, and each of us in his image and for a particular purpose. Science, Sagan says, has blown this out of the water, causing humanity real anxiety. We’re all just … sort of random chemistry accidents. Sagan suggests that “humans cannot live with such a revelation,” and that that reality has bred a sense of hopelessness. What could cure this discontent? Well, space exploration, of course. He offers this suggestion: “Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs – in time, in space, and in potential – the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.” In other words, once we get over ourselves and start to explore this vast universe, we’ll fix both problems. We’ll get back our wandering nature, and fill ourselves with renewed awe.

Sarah: One very interesting addendum to Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot is that historian Howard McCurdy argues that his assessment of humanity’s general discontent was pretty accurate – although his explanation of it might have been a little embellished. Although Pale Blue Dot is published in 1994, Sagan seems to be responding the very real “malaise” that affected the United States during the 1970s, which Jimmy Carter famously pointed out in a televised speech given on July 15, 1979 in which he stated that America was “lacking confidence and a sense of community,” and was suffering from a sense of malaise. The malaise was actually caused by period of economic stagnation, exacerbated by political fatigue after Watergate, frustration with foreign relations, and a sort of come-down from the wackiness of the 1960s. Now, by the time Sagan wrote his theory, the economy had recovered (at least for rich people!) in the 1980s and early 1990s, so the ‘malaise’ had lifted, but also our dependence on consumer comforts had increased even more, causing a new wave of anxieties about softening of American culture, etc. etc. etc. All of this to say that Sagan’s theories were very much informed by the culture that he himself lived in, moreso than some deeply researched sociological or anthropological study of human nature or something.

Averill: Which actually brings us to where the historians come into all this. Hopefully, as you’ve been listening to all these references to Christopher Columbus, and the brave American pioneers, and the glories of exploration, you’ve been shouting at your phone or radio or whatever. Because as historians, we should immediately be critical of oversimplified references to human nature, or to the American ‘character,’ or what-have-you. To state the obvious: it’s not actually a great thing to compare space exploration to Christopher Columbus, and it’s ahistorical to say that there is a monolithic American ‘character’ that was developed through the process of pioneering westward. Is Christopher Columbus really the way you want to sell the possibilities of space exploration – a man who at the very least kickstarted the deaths, oppression, and colonization of American peoples? Frederick Jackson Turner’s description of American moving westward is also super reductive. I mean, the first thing we should as historians is who does he consider Americans? Because there were already Americans on the so-called frontier, right – Native Americans! And as I’m sure Elizabeth would remind us, the growth of the United States into what we recognize today didn’t just happen from East-West. It involved a significant amount of South-North migration and, of course, border changes, as we discussed in our episode on the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, as people who had previously been “Mexican” became Americans overnight as the “border crossed them.”

Sarah: Right, not to mention the immigration that happened from West to East, as Asian immigrants arrived in California and moved in the opposite direction. And of course, we also need to remember that much of this ‘brave pioneering’ involved enormous violence. White Americans didn’t just move across the landscape of the United States in iconic wagon trains and Little House on the Prairie bonnets. The story of westward migration is a story of settler colonialism, where Native Americans were forcibly displaced, murdered in massacres like Sand Creek, Colorado, Mankato, Minnesota, and Wounded Knee, South Dakota, tribes and tribal lands broken up by the Dawes Act, and children ripped from parents and re-educated in boarding schools. Then, of course is the issue that what the frontier meant or represented meant vastly different things to different groups of Americans and at different times across our history. There was a time, for instance, when the open space of the American west represented to many people from the South an opportunity for extending the slave kingdom, to a chance to further retrench and profit off of human bondage. What to one group is simply recalling the lost glories of the ‘exploratory spirit’ is from another perspective a call for oppression and domination. The call to explore space like Columbus explored the New World replicates a particular kind of white, American worldview, one that completely disregards the fact that there might be more than one way of thinking about the actions and legacy of Christopher Columbus.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Twitter

Averill: I mean, this is what historians (and lots of folks in the humanities) do: we problematizes shit. This happens often on Twitter when Neil DeGrasse Tyson will say something that he thinks is incredibly insightful that actually could be easily answered or solved by taking a humanities class. For instance, in Sept 2017, he tweeted “In school, rarely do we learn how data become facts, how facts become knowledge, and how knowledge becomes wisdom.” And every historian’s head exploded, especially all the history of science and history of medicine folks, because that’s literally what they teach in school. I mean, this is easily dismissed as NGT just being self-centered, but it also demonstrates how hyper-focused the sciences can be. And we can’t really blame him, in a way – after all, we’re living in a moment where the STEM fields are treated like the solution to all the world’s problems, including the economy, right? In fact, there was just a study on NPR that found that more students are majoring in the STEM fields even though they would rather major in a humanities field, and then aren’t finding the jobs and salaries that are often promised in college marketing materials. In other words, they’re majoring in STEM fields because they feel like it’s the better economic choice, but then aren’t getting those economic benefits. Anyway, this is the goal of the humanities: to show that you can’t make these sweeping generalizations about human nature. Carl Sagan was a straight up genius, but even he made these broad claims about human nature – that humankind has this innate urge to wander – that just aren’t supported by historical knowledge, or at least rely on very out-of-date historical theories, like the Turner thesis. It’s more complicated than that.

Sarah: And this is sort of the irony of the space boosters using the image of the frontier to sell the space program. As they’re trying to convince Americans that space is the “final frontier,” with the hopes that Americans will understand what they mean by ‘frontier,’ historians were trying desperately to correct the record on the Turner thesis. Waves of revisionist history (which, fyi, is not actually a bad thing ) were starting to publish new Western histories, for instance, that showed that actually Turner was wrong, and that his thesis. (Our good friend and editor in chief at Nursing Clio, Jacqueline Antonovich, is a historian of the American west, and I am having nightmares that I’m going to interpret this ALL WRONG and she will judge me)For instance, some historians asked what exactly Turner meant by frontier. If it’s vanishing, what is it? Open space, a border, a moving zone? Other historians argued that as Americans moved westward, they replicated the culture and governance of the East coast, and were, as historian William Cronon has stated, “were models less of individualism than of dull conformity.” Like, for instance, how does Turner explain cities? Where do women or African Americans or Asian Americans fit into this? You can’t really argue that they were given increased freedom or access to democracy just because they moved to the West! All of these new histories were being written and published at the same time that those in the space world were trying to sell a static and simple idea of ‘frontier’ to market space exploration.

Averill: As Howard McCurdy states very simply, “The image of the frontier is America’s creation myth.” It’s a story we tell ourselves, but not the reality of how our country was settled or how our “national character,” if there is such a thing, was forged. And historians weren’t willing to sit around and let this myth be perpetuated. For instance, in 1982, when the Space Shuttle Columbia successfully landed, President Ronald Reagan stated that the successful end of this flight was “the historical equivalent to the driving of the golden spike which completed the first transcontinental railroad,’ historian Patty Limerick called bullshit. I’m just going to quote here from Howard McCurdy: “To meet the 1869 deadline, railroad workers laid the track so quickly that much of it had ripped up and replaced. Leland Stanford, representing Central Pacific, proved so unfamiliar with the elementary details of railroad construction that he could not drive the golden spike into the ground. The Union Pacific Railroad, half-sponsor to the transcontinental enterprise, went bankrupt twenty-five years later, and the Central Pacific tried to avoid payments on its government loads. Says Limerick, “A reference to the Golden Spike, to anyone who is serious about history, is also a reference to enterprises done with too much haste and grandstanding, and with too little care for detail.” Not exactly what Reagan was going for when he compared the Columbia landing to that golden spike, huh?

Sarah: Maybe – and I’m just spit-balling here – but maybe scientists should be required to take a few history classes. I’ll make one last point: Just because we know that Turner’s thesis was wrong, doesn’t mean that people didn’t really believe it. There’s a reason that Gene Roddenberry used the phrase “space the final frontier” in the original series. We like to believe that Americans, and humans, too, maybe, have an innate need to explore, and that we should explore outer space as an extension of that. We like to believe that it’s inevitable, the natural next step in an ongoing human story. The mythological frontier is really entrenched in the American psyche, so all this makes perfect sense. It’s not as though these space boosters were maliciously lying to encourage exploration, but rather that they didn’t know what they didn’t know.

William Cronon, “Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner,” Western Historical Quarterly 18 (1987): 157-176.

Howard McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997).

Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920).

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'Star Trek': That Final Frontier, Boldly Reapproached

Bob Mondello

Cosmic Youth: Meet the new Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto). They're front and center in J.J. Abrams' bold, brilliant Star Trek reboot. Paramount Pictures hide caption

Cosmic Youth: Meet the new Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto). They're front and center in J.J. Abrams' bold, brilliant Star Trek reboot.

• Director: J.J. Abrams
• Genre: Sci-Fi Fantasy/Adventure
• Running Time: 126 minutes

Rated: PG-13 With: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Leonard Nimoy, Eric Bana (Recommended)

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'Kirk Meets Uhura'

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Abrams amps up the reboot's buzz factor by casting magnetic young actors in the iconic roles: Zoe Saldana as the xenolinguistics genius Uhura, above ... Paramount Pictures hide caption

Abrams amps up the reboot's buzz factor by casting magnetic young actors in the iconic roles: Zoe Saldana as the xenolinguistics genius Uhura, above ...

... and John Cho as Sulu. Paramount Pictures hide caption

... and John Cho as Sulu.

You'd think that after six TV series and 10 motion pictures, there'd be few places in the universe a Federation starship could still "boldly go where no one has gone before." But you may be surprised.

If an opening 10 minutes of photon-blasting doesn't grab fans by their collarless collars, the introduction of one of the major characters almost certainly will: He's sandy-haired, cocky, kinda charming, a risk-taker — and not real fond of being told what to do, as a hovercycle-riding policeman discovers when he tries to pull over the 11-year-old James Tiberius Kirk, who's joy riding in a stolen car.

Baby Kirk gets just a few moments of screen time — just enough to prove that director J.J. Abrams has rethought his Star Trek reboot from the ground up. A couple of scenes later, you'll recognize a more familiar Kirk: flirtatious in a collegiately Shatnerish way, chatting up a pretty Starfleet cadet in a bar. Her name's Uhura.

And Kirk the patient listener surfaces a bit later, when a nervous student doctor is strapped in next to him on a space shuttle and starts a rant about how if there's a crack in the hull, their blood'll boil in 13 seconds.

Sparks of recognition? Well, the aim here is to court a new generation of fans without alienating the true believers speaking Klingon in the box-office lines. Director Abrams was in diapers the year the original Star Trek series went on the air, but he's pledged to honor the past while bringing in cool young performers — Sulu played by Harold (without Kumar), Scotty by that Shawn of the Dead guy.

And he promised to revive what was starting to seem like a walking-dead franchise by replacing '60s-vintage techno-babble with something more modern. In short, to set phasers on stun with a killer opening sequence, beam up a bit of past-altering time travel to guarantee a new future, and to make sure that new future stays familiar by keeping personality quirks front and center.

Especially Kirk's intuitional yin and Spock's rational yang. Youth makes a big difference with these guys. Chris Pine's 20-something Kirk is a frat boy chafing at his every contact with logic-obsessed Spock; the latter ( Heroes supervillain Zachary Quinto) is an academic nerd so wet behind the pointy ears that you can't wait to see him lose his Vulcanized cool.

While no villain was ever going to steal focus from these guys, the writers haven't done Eric Bana's snarling Romulan any favors. His nefariousness is so beside the point that the film takes a timeout to let Leonard Nimoy offer a benediction to the new cast.

Of course, the point of a reboot isn't really to tell a tale; it's to ensure that the underlying enterprise can go on. Abrams has done that, for sure, and if it feels toward the end of his Star Trek that the various plot points have been scattered to the edges of the known universe, well ... it's hard to imagine anyone caring much why we're plunging ahead at warp speed, when the ride is so insanely satisfying.

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Published Jun 9, 2014

The Final Frontier 25 Years Later

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier opened on June 9, 1989 -- or 25 years ago today. The film, directed by William Shatner, remains as polarizing as ever all these years later. In it, Sybok, an emotional Vulcan, and his followers take hostages on Nimbus III, the so-called Planet of Galactic Peace. Sybok intends to locate God, and his plan is simple: take hostages on Nimbus III, lure a starship there and use it to fulfill his destiny. Of course, that ship is the Enteprise, and Kirk and especially Spock -- Sybok's half-brother -- have other ideas about Sybok's quest to breach the Great Barrier.

The Final Frontier is widely regarded as the least successful TOS feature. Despite a genuinely daring and thought-provoking premise -- searching for God -- the general perception was, is and will likely forever be that the film just doesn't work. Too much around the central premise doesn't play as intended. Nothing operational on the Enterprise? Scotty bumping into things? "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" sung around a campfire? Cringe-worthy lines like "On the contrary, gravity is the foremost thing on my mind" or "Please, captain, not in front of the Klingons," didn't help, nor did lackluster visual effects.

So, some questions to ponder, lines to remember and factoids to absorb...

-- First, what did YOU think of the infamous campfire scene?

-- Was the search for God too big an idea for even Star Trek to tackle?

-- The film, in our view, was almost redeemed by two memorable Kirk lines, "Excuse me. Excuse me... but what does God need with a starship?" and "Who am I? Don't you know? Aren't you... God?"

-- Runner up: McCoy referring to Spock: "God, I liked him better before he died."

-- Another good one, from Sybok: "I don't control minds. I free them."

-- At one point, The Final Frontier and Star Trek: The Next Generation filmed next door to one another on the Paramount Pictures lot.

-- Pretty much everyone on the planet knows this, but first choice to play Sybok was... Sean Connery. The reference to Sha Ka Ree is a tip of the cap to the actor.

-- Laurence Luckinbill, who did play Sybok, was the son-in-law of Lucille Ball. It was Ball and her company, Desilu, that first green-lit The Original Series.

-- George Murdock, who co-starred as God, went on to play Admiral Hanson in the TNG two-parter, " The Best of Both Worlds ." The actor passed away in 2012 at the age of 81.

-- Charles Cooper, who played Klingon General Korrd, later appeared on TNG as Klingon Chancellor K'mpec in " Sins of the Father " and " Reunion ." He died at the age of 87 in 2013.

-- The Final Frontier grossed a strong $17 million its opening weekend, but tallied only $52 million during its entire theatrical run.

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Space... the final frontier

Fifty years ago Captain Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise began their journey into space -- the final frontier. Now, as the newest Star Trek film hits cinemas, the NASA/ESA Hubble space telescope is also exploring new frontiers, observing distant galaxies in the galaxy cluster Abell S1063 as part of the Frontier Fields programme.

Space... the final frontier. These are the stories of the Hubble Space Telescope. Its continuing mission, to explore strange new worlds and to boldly look where no telescope has looked before.

The newest target of Hubble's mission is the distant galaxy cluster Abell S1063, potentially home to billions of strange new worlds.

This view of the cluster, which can be seen in the centre of the image, shows it as it was four billion years ago. But Abell S1063 allows us to explore a time even earlier than this, where no telescope has really looked before. The huge mass of the cluster distorts and magnifies the light from galaxies that lie behind it due to an effect called gravitational lensing. This allows Hubble to see galaxies that would otherwise be too faint to observe and makes it possible to search for, and study, the very first generation of galaxies in the Universe. "Fascinating," as a famous Vulcan might say.

The first results from the data on Abell S1063 promise some remarkable new discoveries. Already, a galaxy has been found that is observed as it was just a billion years after the Big Bang.

Astronomers have also identified sixteen background galaxies whose light has been distorted by the cluster, causing multiple images of them to appear on the sky. This will help astronomers to improve their models of the distribution of both ordinary and dark matter in the galaxy cluster, as it is the gravity from these that causes the distorting effects. These models are key to understanding the mysterious nature of dark matter.

Abell S1063 is not alone in its ability to bend light from background galaxies, nor is it the only one of these huge cosmic lenses to be studied using Hubble. Three other clusters have already been observed as part of the Frontier Fields programme, and two more will be observed over the next few years, giving astronomers a remarkable picture of how they work and what lies both within and beyond them.*

Data gathered from the previous galaxy clusters were studied by teams all over the world, enabling them to make important discoveries, among them galaxies that existed only hundreds of million years after the Big Bang heic1523 and the first predicted appearance of a gravitationally lensed supernova heic1525.

Such an extensive international collaboration would have made Gene Roddenberry, the father of Star Trek, proud. In the fictional world Roddenberry created, a diverse crew work together to peacefully explore the Universe. This dream is partially achieved by the Hubble programme in which the European Space Agency (ESA), supported by 22 member states, and NASA collaborate to operate one of the most sophisticated scientific instruments in the world. Not to mention the scores of other international science teams that cross state, country and continental borders to achieve their scientific aims.

*The Hubble Frontier Fields is a three-year, 840-orbit programme which will yield the deepest views of the Universe to date, combining the power of Hubble with the gravitational amplification of light around six different galaxy clusters to explore more distant regions of space than could otherwise be seen.

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heic1615 — Photo Release

Space... the final frontier.

21 July 2016

Fifty years ago Captain Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise began their journey into space — the final frontier. Now, as the newest Star Trek film hits cinemas, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is also exploring new frontiers, observing distant galaxies in the galaxy cluster Abell S1063 as part of the Frontier Fields programme.

Space... the final frontier. These are the stories of the Hubble Space Telescope. Its continuing mission, to explore strange new worlds and to boldly look where no telescope has looked before.

The newest target of Hubble’s mission is the distant galaxy cluster Abell S1063, potentially home to billions of strange new worlds.

This view of the cluster, which can be seen in the centre of the image, shows it as it was four billion years ago. But Abell S1063 allows us to explore a time even earlier than this, where no telescope has really looked before. The huge mass of the cluster distorts and magnifies the light from galaxies that lie behind it due to an effect called gravitational lensing . This allows Hubble to see galaxies that would otherwise be too faint to observe and makes it possible to search for, and study, the very first generation of galaxies in the Universe. “Fascinating” , as a famous Vulcan might say.

The first results from the data on Abell S1063 promise some remarkable new discoveries. Already, a galaxy has been found that is observed as it was just a billion years after the Big Bang.

Astronomers have also identified sixteen background galaxies whose light has been distorted by the cluster, causing multiple images of them to appear on the sky. This will help astronomers to improve their models of the distribution of both ordinary and dark matter in the galaxy cluster, as it is the gravity from these that causes the distorting effects. These models are key to understanding the mysterious nature of dark matter.

Abell S1063 is not alone in its ability to bend light from background galaxies, nor is it the only one of these huge cosmic lenses to be studied using Hubble. Three other clusters have already been observed as part of the Frontier Fields programme , and two more will be observed over the next few years, giving astronomers a remarkable picture of how they work and what lies both within and beyond them [1] .

Data gathered from the previous galaxy clusters were studied by teams all over the world, enabling them to make important discoveries, among them galaxies that existed only hundreds of million years after the Big Bang ( heic1523 ) and the first predicted appearance of a gravitationally lensed supernova ( heic1525 ).

Such an extensive international collaboration would have made Gene Roddenberry, the father of Star Trek, proud. In the fictional world Roddenberry created, a diverse crew work together to peacefully explore the Universe. This dream is partially achieved by the Hubble programme in which the European Space Agency (ESA), supported by 22 member states, and NASA collaborate to operate one of the most sophisticated scientific instruments in the world. Not to mention the scores of other international science teams that cross state, country and continental borders to achieve their scientific aims.

[1] The Hubble Frontier Fields is a three-year, 840-orbit programme which will yield the deepest views of the Universe to date, combining the power of Hubble with the gravitational amplification of light around six different galaxy clusters to explore more distant regions of space than could otherwise be seen.

More information

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Lotz (STScI)

• Images of Hubble
• Frontier Fields programme
• Link to hubblesite release

Mathias Jäger ESA/Hubble Public Information Officer Garching bei München, Germany Tel: +49 176 62397500 Email: [email protected]

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