Sixty years after television audiences first tuned in to see the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, an astronaut on board the International Space Station has paid tribute to Star Trek by flying the badge of the franchise’s latest fictional captain.
Expedition 75 flight engineer Sophie Adenot with European Space Agency (ESA) donned the Delta badge originally worn by actor Anson Mount for a video recorded from aboard the space station. Mount portrays Christoper Pike in the Paramount+ streaming series Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Paramount and ESA both released the clip on their Instagram feeds.
“For 60 years, Star Trek has brought us stories of friendship and exploration. I’m wearing Captain Pike’s badge aboard the ISS in celebration of continuing the real world work of science and exploration,” said Adenot. “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.”
“Happy 60th Star Trek. Live long and prosper,” she said, displaying the traditional Vulcan salute.
“Explore. Discover. Do it together.”
In a post accompanying the video, ESA said that the pin was flown by Adenot as part of her European “Epsilon” mission as a way of representing what Star Trek has in common with the ongoing effort by humanity to explore.
“It’s a small object, but it carries something bigger—60 years of a story that taught us to dream about exploring together,” reads the agency’s post. “For more than 50 years, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing. We’ve sent people and machines beyond Earth, built spacecraft with partners from dozens of countries and kept asking the same question Star Trek never stopped asking: what’s out there, and what can we learn from it?”