NBC Cancelled It After Three Seasons. Then One of the Cast Started Recruiting Astronauts for NASA.

The case in brief

Star Trek ran on NBC for three seasons between September 1966 and June 1969. It was never a hit. It was renewed for a third season only after an organised letter-writing campaign, moved to a Friday-night slot that killed what audience it had, and cancelled. Seventy-nine episodes were made.

What happened afterwards is the part worth documenting. Sold into syndication and stripped across weekday afternoons in the early 1970s, the show found an audience several times larger than the one that had failed to save it. The first convention was held in 1972. The first feature film followed in 1979. The cast of a cancelled programme spent the rest of their lives being the cast of a cancelled programme — and several of them did remarkable things with it.

Dates and documents

1. 8 September 1966

   Star Trek premieres on NBC.

2. 1968

   A viewer letter-writing campaign contributes to a third-season renewal, in a Friday 10pm slot.

3. 3 June 1969

   The final original episode airs. The series is cancelled after 79 episodes.

4. 1972

   The first large Star Trek convention is held in New York as syndicated reruns build a mass audience.

5. 1977

   NASA contracts Nichelle Nichols to recruit for the astronaut corps. The 1978 intake includes the first American women and first Black Americans selected as astronauts.

6. 7 December 1979

   Star Trek: The Motion Picture is released, ten years after cancellation.

7. 2005

   George Takei comes out publicly and begins speaking about his childhood in US internment camps for Japanese Americans.

8. 13 October 2021

   William Shatner flies to space aboard a Blue Origin suborbital flight at the age of 90, becoming the oldest person to have done so.

Established beyond dispute

• The series was cancelled in 1969 after three seasons and became a phenomenon only in syndication.
• NASA contracted Nichelle Nichols in 1977 to recruit women and people of colour into the astronaut programme; the class selected in 1978 included Sally Ride, Guion Bluford, Ronald McNair and Judith Resnik.
• Leonard Nimoy published two memoirs, I Am Not Spock (1975) and I Am Spock (1995), whose titles describe a twenty-year argument with himself.
• George Takei spent part of his childhood in US internment camps and has spoken and written about it publicly since 2005.
• William Shatner flew to space in October 2021 at the age of 90.

The recruitment contract nobody expects

In 1977 NASA had a problem it could name precisely: the astronaut corps was entirely white and entirely male, and the shuttle programme needed a broader intake. It hired Nichelle Nichols, through her company, to run recruitment. She toured universities and professional bodies making the case in person, on the strength of a character she had played on a cancelled television programme a decade earlier.

The 1978 astronaut class contained Sally Ride, the first American woman in space; Guion Bluford, the first African American in space; Ronald McNair; and Judith Resnik. McNair and Resnik were killed aboard Challenger in 1986. The link between an actor's recruitment tour and a NASA intake is not folklore invented by fans — it is in NASA's own published history.

Nichols had nearly left the show after the first season to return to musical theatre. Her account, which she gave consistently for fifty years, is that Martin Luther King Jr told her at a fundraiser that she should stay, because the role was one of the few on American television in which a Black woman was shown as a professional equal. She stayed.

Continue reading · What happened next?What Happened to the Cast of The Wizard of Oz After 1939An actor hospitalised by his own make-up, an actress set alight by a special effect, and a sixteen-year-old lead who was already on studio-supplied medication. The documented aftermath of the most-watched film ever made.

Where each of them ended up

Leonard Nimoy directed two of the most successful films in the series, published poetry and photography, and died on 27 February 2015. DeForest Kelley, who played McCoy, worked steadily and quietly and died on 11 June 1999. James Doohan, the engineer whose accent generations of children imitated, died in 2005; portions of his ashes were subsequently flown into space, including to the International Space Station.

George Takei was interned as a child at Rohwer in Arkansas and Tule Lake in California; he came out publicly in 2005 and turned the internment history into a Broadway musical, Allegiance, in 2015. Walter Koenig received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2012. Nichelle Nichols died on 30 July 2022. Majel Barrett, who was in the very first pilot and voiced the ship's computer for four decades, died in 2008.

The aftermath

William Shatner, who was 38 when the series was cancelled, is the last of the principal bridge crew still living. In October 2021, aged 90, he flew a suborbital mission aboard a Blue Origin New Shepard capsule and returned visibly shaken, describing the blackness of space rather than its beauty — a widely broadcast, on-camera account that is the least triumphant thing anyone has said after a spaceflight.

The eleven-foot studio model of the Enterprise hangs in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, restored and displayed as an artefact of American design. NBC cancelled the show that built it. Everything that made it matter happened after the cancellation notice.