Trek Talks: An Astronaut's Voyage to the Final Frontier

Premiering three years before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, Star Trek helped catalyze the public's curiosity about space travel and the existence of life beyond our planet, representing it not as unattainable fantasy but as a reality that was within our reach. Rooting the Enterprise's voyages within galaxies and constellations that were known to be in existence (the planet Vulcan may have been invented, but the star system it belongs to is entirely real), Star Trek also posited futuristic technologies based on imaginative extrapolations of the universe's physical laws, such as warp speed — a propulsion system that "bends" space-time to enable otherwise impossibly rapid travel across vast distances — and teleportation, which transmutes a person or object into an energy pattern and beams it to another location. While these technologies have yet to be realized (and may never be), the efforts to ground Star Trek in scientific fact has endeared it to the scientific community for decades. To explore the innovative ways in which Star Trek represented space travel and technology, we welcome Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen for a keynote presentation on Star Trek and space. Lt. Col. Hansen was one of two recruits selected in May 2009 through the third Canadian Astronaut Recruitment Campaign. While waiting for a flight assignment, Lt. Col. Hansen works at NASA's Mission Control Center as Capcom, the voice between the ground and the ISS. Join us on this voyage to the Final Frontier!