rigel 7

Later in the year, we are going to visit fabulous Las Vegas and we are very excited about the all the exotic sights to see in that desert playground. I think it is really a shame, however, that one resort experience planned for Vegas never made it beyond the sandbox. In 1992, capitalizing on the enormous popularity of the Star Trek franchise—The Next Generation and the later spin-offs of Voyager and Deep Space Nine—and wanting to revive the downtown area, the Strip with the colossal casinos and hotels was the bigger tourists’ draw, a group of investors and architects proposed creating a Star Trek theme park with a towering, full size (non-operational) model of the Enterprise housing space age accommodations—the standard complement of crew being 430, dining and entertainment, keeping true to the series. High speed elevators would shuttle guests around—perhaps between the Holodeck and a lounge on the ship’s bridge or in the engine room. I imagine that the whole experience would have been beyond surreal and possibly sort of goofy, like those classic episodes from the original series when the crew find themselves confronted with alien civilizations unduly influenced by the wild, wild West or Greek mythology or Prohibition era Chicago gangsters.  It’s too bad really that the project never was launched but it’s comforting that the series still captures the imagination, as much now as back then.