# What was up with the Enterprise's "Five Year Mission"? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [February 13, 2012, 2:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659 "2012-02-13T02:24:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Love\_Rhombus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/love_rhombus/32/10694_2.png) [@Love\_Rhombus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Love_Rhombus)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2012, 2:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/21 "2012-02-13T14:09:52Z")
[Geek trivia] The Mirror Universe ships were apparently on\*\* thirty-year\*\* missions.[\Geek Trivia] :eek: ---
**Author:** ![JohnGalt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johngalt/32/184_2.png) [@JohnGalt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JohnGalt)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2012, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/22 "2012-02-13T14:11:59Z")
> [@Tim\_R.Mortiss](#): > > I think it was just wishful thinking on the part of the producers: “We hope this show lasts for five seasons!” As we all know, it didn’t quite make it that long. Or it made it much longer, depending on how you look at it. I think Tim has it - I recall reading this in David Gerrold’s book “(The Story Behind) The Trouble With Tribbles” but since I’m travelling now I can’t verify that. Anyway, supposedly Gene Roddenberry wanted to send the message to NBC executives that he considered Star Trek to be a five-year series, even though he barely got three years. ---
**Author:** ![BigT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bigt/32/12044_2.png) [@BigT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BigT)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2012, 2:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/23 "2012-02-13T14:32:09Z")
BTW: many people consider the animated series to have concluded the five year mission. Though it only lasted one season (22 episodes), so there should still be a year to go. I guess that year occurred offscreen to set up the first movie. ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2012, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/24 "2012-02-13T17:51:59Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > BTW: many people consider the animated series to have concluded the five year mission. Though it only lasted one season (22 episodes), so there should still be a year to go. I guess that year occurred offscreen to set up the first movie. There are other gaps too. I believe the first time we see the Enterprise-E in the movie First Contact, someone says that they have already been in space for a year. So, there’s a year that was never shown. Also, I think that there may be other missions that were supposed to have been undertaken by the Enterprise-A, because otherwise that ship had a REALLY short career from its introduction in ST IV to its order for decommissioning in ST VI (did they discover a serious flaw in the Constitution class design or something that made it urgent that they scrap all extant ones or something?). ---
**Author:** ![cochrane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cochrane/32/10441_2.png) [@cochrane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cochrane)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2012, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/25 "2012-02-13T18:10:44Z")
> [@astro](#): > > It was basically the Navy in space carrying people around, responding to emergencies and putting out fires. I don’t remember who said it, but I once heard the Enterprise described as being like an inter-planetary “Mary Worth,” meddling around in their neighbors’ businesses. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2012, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/26 "2012-02-13T18:24:54Z")
> [@](#): > > On DS9, the show takes place on a space station that uses a 26 hour day, because it belongs to a planet (Bajor) that has a 26 hour day. > > But that always kind of bugged me, since it seems unlikely a Bajoran day would be exactly one-twelth longer then a Earth day. Maybe the Bajorans just defined an hour as one-26th of their day length, but then that means when characters talk about an “hour”, its a different length of time then we mean here on Earth. And then, when they talk about “minutes”, do they mean one-60th of an Earth hour or a Bajoran hour. Seconds are probably still seconds, because that’s the basic time unit used by science. From there, though, you can go in a bunch of different directions: 1: Use an Earth clock (or a clock based on some other prominent civilization; Vulcan maybe?) on all Federation-controlled ships and stations (obviously they didn’t do this, but it’s an option). 2: Use Earth hours, but only use as many of them as fit in the local planet’s day. Some time in the middle of the night, have a fractional hour, so the clocks go straight from 13:23:16 to 1:00, or whatever. 3: Round off the number of Earth hours in a local day to the nearest integer, and locally define an “hour” to be that fraction of a local day. You then have another decision to make, whether to define “minutes” relative to hours or to seconds. 4: Locally define an “hour” to be 1/24 of a local day, and just accept that they can be significantly longer or shorter than standard. Again, not something they actually did, but an option. 5: Choose a different convention for every station, based on what seems to make most sense in the context. Maybe one planet is really close to 24 hours anyway, and another is settled by traditionalists from Earth who observe Earth time even on the planet itself, and on another, there’s a tense diplomatic situation where we don’t want to antagonize the locals by imposing our clock, and so on. Really, in an age when all clocks can be expected to be computerized, any of these would be viable. ---
**Author:** ![KneadToKnow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kneadtoknow/32/3999_2.png) [@KneadToKnow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KneadToKnow)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2012, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/27 "2012-02-13T18:32:55Z")
> [@BigT](#): > > BTW: many people consider the animated series to have concluded the five year mission. Though it only lasted one season (22 episodes), so there should still be a year to go. I guess that year occurred offscreen to set up the first movie. The animated series, while only containing 22 episodes, did in fact air over [two seasons](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069637/combined). ---
**Author:** ![Gagundathar](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a183cd/32.png) [@Gagundathar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gagundathar)\ **Post date:** [February 13, 2012, 6:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/28 "2012-02-13T18:42:55Z")
Since the Enterprise in TOS was a human crewed ship (with the obvious exception of Spock), it is very likely they had three eight hour shifts and used a Terran clock and calender. However, because of the problems of relativistic time compression (which would happen when they went to impulse drive, and perhaps even in warp) Kirk uses stardates to chronicle their voyage when sending missives back to Starfleet HQ. That is the classic answer, says a guy who has been a total geek fan since 1966. ---
**Author:** ![TBG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c89c15/32.png) [@TBG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TBG)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2012, 12:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/29 "2012-02-14T00:03:24Z")
> [@robert\_columbia](#): > > Also, I think that there may be other missions that were supposed to have been undertaken by the Enterprise-A, because otherwise that ship had a REALLY short career from its introduction in ST IV to its order for decommissioning in ST VI (did they discover a serious flaw in the Constitution class design or something that made it urgent that they scrap all extant ones or something?). Maybe a short career as the Enterprise, but I think it’s semi-canon that it wasn’t a brand new ship, but rather another of the same class that had undergone a refit and then re-christened as the Enterprise-A when the opportunity came up. ---
**Author:** ![Alan\_Smithee](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/2acd7d/32.png) [@Alan\_Smithee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alan_Smithee)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2012, 5:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/30 "2012-02-14T05:52:47Z")
> [@TBG](#): > > Maybe a short career as the Enterprise, but I think it’s semi-canon that it wasn’t a brand new ship, but rather another of the same class that had undergone a refit and then re-christened as the Enterprise-A when the opportunity came up. I believe it was supposed to have been the _Yorktown_. Actually, given the level of technology in Star Trek, the absurd ease of manufacturing with replicators and the apparent supply of free labor (people work to “better themselves”), it would make far more sense for starships to be pretty much disposable, replaced or redesigned and reconfigured about as often as a PC updates its software. (Someone submits a bug report that if the [del]toilet[/del]head in the officer’s cabins could be moved 3 1/2 inches aft, it would have enough clearance to accomodate Thorian females and would provide 3 square feet of additional floorspace useable by Cephalopoidians, and the next time the ship’s in subspace communication range, all the plumbing and bulkheads are beamed out and new ones replicated in place.) ---
**Author:** ![Sitnam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Sitnam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sitnam)\ **Post date:** [February 14, 2012, 6:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/31 "2012-02-14T06:09:47Z")
A cheap tactic to keep the network paying you, if it lasts 6 years the fans will just ignore that bit. ---
**Author:** ![TBG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/c89c15/32.png) [@TBG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TBG)\ **Post date:** [February 17, 2012, 1:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/32 "2012-02-17T01:50:59Z")
> [@Sitnam](#): > > A cheap tactic to keep the network paying you, if it lasts 6 years the fans will just ignore that bit. If it lasts 6 years, time for a new 5 year mission (hoping to get 10 years out the network). ---
**Author:** ![Fleetwood](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fleetwood/32/271_2.png) [@Fleetwood](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fleetwood)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2012, 7:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/33 "2012-02-19T19:03:01Z")
> [@Jim\_s\_Son](#): > > Plus if you want to get the attention of people channel surfing in 1966 and just happen upon this show, you have an inkling that they are usually encountering new and different life forms. So if a new viewer would also know that each week probably involves new characters for Kirk to mate with. There was no channel surfing in 1966! ---
**Author:** ![GreenElf](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/9de053/32.png) [@GreenElf](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenElf)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2012, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/34 "2012-02-19T23:07:02Z")
The original Star Trek writers may have been big fans of communist planning. ---
**Author:** ![Clothahump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/51bf81/32.png) [@Clothahump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Clothahump)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2012, 11:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/35 "2012-02-19T23:53:54Z")
Sly effort by The Great Bird Of The Galaxy to get a long-running series. ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2012, 12:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/36 "2012-02-20T00:21:44Z")
> [@grude](#): > > I liken it to the scientific voyages undertaken in the 18th and 19th century, they were simply to send some scientists like naturalists to a specific place or just area and spend a set amount of time exploring and collecting specimens for further study at home. > > They were often going to extremely remote areas where they were basically on their own without hope of help coming for years or decades. > > Think Charles Darwin on the Beagle sailing to the Galapagos. That really is not why they went, though (with the partial exception, perhaps, of Cook’s voyages). The Beagle’s mission was to chart the coastlines and surrounding waters of southern South America on behalf of the Royal Navy. For the world’s dominant naval power, this was a perfectly pragmatic military mission. Darwin was just taken along to keep the captain company. Captain Fitzgerald was afraid he would go crazy and kill himself from the loneliness of not having another upper-class, educated Englishman to talk to, and, thanks to his aristocratic family connections, he was able to get someone assigned to him as a companion. It is as though McCoy were only on the Enterprise to keep Kirk from going nuts. (Hmmm. Maybe something in that. And Picard had Troi…) (Fitzgerald’s fear of suicide was not baseless. The previous captain of the Beagle, on a similar mission, had indeed hanged himself during the voyage, and Fitzgerald did eventually die by his own hand, although many years later, back in England.) Darwin volunteered to go, of course, because he was a huge natural history geek, and fancied the exploring (and it was also a good excuse to get out of having to go and be a parson in some backwater parish, which what his father had planned for him after Charles had disappointed him by dropping out of medical school). However, it was no part of the navy’s or the British government’s plan to send a naturalist along on the Beagle’s voyage. (And if it had been, they would not have sent an amateur, as Darwin then was.) Most of the other British naturalist-explorers of the era were really naval ships’ doctors, essentially doing a bit of natural history in their spare time. I think there was some degree of official encouragement of this, but it was not their main duty, and almost always quite incidental to their ship’s real naval mission. ---
**Author:** ![Peter\_Morris](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/peter_morris/32/359_2.png) [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2012, 1:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/37 "2012-02-20T01:14:05Z")
> [@astro](#): > > I just thought it was a bit odd that there is absolutely no discussion of “the 5 year mission” in any context whatsoever in the show while it is big dealed as the main rationale for the show in the intro. There was one episode where Kirk finds himself alone on a deserted Enterprise with the alien girl of the week. He muses that he has food to last 300 people 5 years, enough to last them forever. ---
**Author:** ![Apollyon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/apollyon/32/4238_2.png) [@Apollyon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Apollyon)\ **Post date:** [February 20, 2012, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659/38 "2012-02-20T01:49:01Z")
> [@Alan\_Smithee](#): > > I believe it was supposed to have been the _Yorktown_. Or the _USS Ti-Ho_, depending on which source material one is referencing. (_Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual_ says _Yorktown_, _Mr. Scott’s Guide to the Enterprise_ says _Ti-Ho_). Do I get extra geek credit.. or is it just sad to know that? 🙂 [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-was-up-with-the-enterprises-five-year-mission/612659.md?page=1)