“After the show was cancelled, most props were thrown in the dumpster,” Brooks Peck, curator at the EMP museum in Seattle, says of the set of Star Trek: The Original Series.

Peck is just one of many curators, actors, screenwriters, and fans that we meet in the Smithsonian Channel’s two-hour Star Trek tribute, Building Star Trek. Peck’s quiet enthusiasm shines through the frenetically-structured special. Part-documentary and part-reality show, the special shows how the iconic props from The Original Series are being restored and how they’ve influenced contemporary science.

Cheap props, rich imagination

As a fan, seeing the old Star Trek props is often as interesting as seeing the contemporary science that the props inspired. Building Star Trek opens with the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum bringing the original 11-foot model of the Starship Enterprise to expert restorers. The museum hopes to display the model in the Boeing “Icons of Flight” entry hall. Despite how precious some might consider the original Enterprise, the documentary gives the impression that most of the props and sets that survived have not been well cared for. On the model Enterprise, the Air and Space Museum’s chief conservator Malcolm Collum points out chipping paint and 50-year-old glue coming apart at the seams. The wiring within the ship that was used to light up its windows also needs restoring so the model won’t catch fire.