Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

That was the voyage of the Starship Enterprise.  The actual “starship” from the original Star Trek television series is an eleven foot model that now rests in a large glass case in the lower level of the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C.

You have to fight your way through the souvenir shop, find the stairs to the lower level, then go to the very back to find it amid all the cheap toys. It has no special lighting, and with the external glare on the case, was very hard to photograph. Not to mention that it looked a bit tired or dirty.  It just didn’t seem like a fitting place for one of the most famous science fiction icons in the world.

Fitting or not, it still feels larger than life as you imagine Captain Kirk aboard , “to boldly go where no man has gone  before.”