Star Trek’s 60th anniversary has reached orbit.
A small Starfleet badge from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds flew to the International Space Station with European Space Agency astronaut Sophie Adenot, who wore it in a video posted by ESA and Star Trek.
“It’s a small object, but it carries something bigger: sixty years of a story that taught us to dream about exploring together,” ESA said in a separate post showing the golden badge floating in front of the station’s Cupola windows.
Adenot launched to the ISS aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule on NASA’s Crew-12 mission on Feb. 13 and is serving as flight engineer for ISS Expedition 75. It is her first launch to space.
Her mission is set to wrap up soon, pending the launch and arrival of SpaceX’s next Dragon spacecraft carrying the astronauts of NASA’s Crew-13 mission, expected within a few weeks.
In the video, Adenot wears the Starfleet badge on her ESA-issued ISS shirt while floating in ESA’s Columbus laboratory module.
“For me, exploration and science are about curiosity and cooperation, daring to go a little farther together, learning from what we discover and build, and turning that knowledge into a better future for everyone,” she said.
Star Trek premiered on Sept. 8, 1966, and has long told stories that put social issues and cultural conflicts front and center.
“The whole show was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but to take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms,” creator Gene Roddenberry said in the 1976 album The Star Trek Philosophy.
“If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet, then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly out there.”
ESA echoed that message in its post.
“Science fiction imagines the future. We build it,” ESA said. “From the crew of the USS Enterprise to the crews on the International Space Station, the mission hasn’t really changed. Explore. Discover. Do it together.”
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