Summary
According to the lore ofStar Trek, the very first warp speed trip a human ever took into space only lasted for a few minutes. The maiden voyageof Zephrem Cochrane’s ship, the Pheonix, is an important historic event, but it marked just the beginning of space travel as humans knew it.
Other spacefaring races had already spent years in space when Terrans were just getting started, and when the Federation did send crews into space, their missions were several years long. There are stories throughout the galaxy of the brave souls who went on some of the longest missions in space, many of them lasting for years or even centuries.
7The Raven
3 years
This is the story of a darting three-year research mission that ended in tragedy, but the legacy of the Raven as one of hope and knowledge defeating fear and superstition lived on. It was a federation ship used strictly for research, and when exobiologists Magnus and Erin Hansen offered to take the ship to study a mysterious new race of cybernetic beings, Starfleet let them do it.
There was one additional crew member on the trip, Magnus and Erin’s daughter Annika. Sincethis was a routine missionthat was strictly one of research, it was initially believed they wouldn’t be in any danger. However, they disobeyed a direct order and crossed into the neutral zone, never to be heard from again.
It was three more years until any trace of the Raven was found, and it was revealed they had been caught and assimilated by the Borg. Annika Hansen survived as Seven of Nine and made history as the first recorded example of a Borg escaping from the collective.
6USS Enterprise
5 years
Everyone who has ever watched the classic series has heard Captain Kirk’s preamble at the beginning about the Enterprise and its “five-year mission.” Even though the show only lasted for three seasons, the actual mission was slightly longer, which is the case with otherStar Trekshows.
The voyage of the Enterprise formed the basis of everything else in the franchise that was to come, including the whole concept of long-term missions of exploration in space. When the franchise returned to television in the 1990s, it was a concept that would continue and even carry a whole show.
5Voyager
7 years
This could also be a whopping twenty-seven years, but thanks to some fancy footwork by Admiral Janeway, the time was cut to a much quicker and easier seven. When Voyager first got warped into the Delta quadrant, it was initially thought it would take several decades to get back, even at maximum warp, but several happy accidents and clever tricks cut that time down.
Part ofJaneway’s signature stylewas using her wits against even the most fearsome enemies, and this time she tricked the Borg into letting Voyager use their extensive wormhole system to make a shortcut back to the Alpha Quadrant. She also managed to cripple the Borg and deliver their wormhole network to the Federation.
4USS Enterprise-D
10 years
As the technology and diplomacy of the United Federation of Planets grew, so did the length of the missions. Instead of a mere five years like its predecessor, the Enterprise D was out for ten years, even thoughTNGonly lasted eight years as a show.
As the official television reboot of the series, with no small amount of hype, viewers had high expectations for aStar Trekshow that was expected to be more complex and in-depth thanTOS. The mission of the Enterprise D was extensive, and thanks to the leadership of Jean-Luc Picard, they took extended space voyages to the next level.
3IKS T’Ong
75 years
It wasn’t just Federation ships that were capable of long space missions. The IKS T’Ong was a Klingon ship that was sent on a long-term mission that required the crew to be in cryogenic sleep for several decades. They were asleep for so long that when they woke up, the Klingon Empire was a thing of the past, and aggression against the Federation was over.
This made the crew and their mission obsolete, but they were unaware of this,and the Enterprise wassent to intervene and destroy the ship if necessary. Luckily, the presence of Worf on the bridge, who was pretending to be the captain at one point, was enough to talk the Klingons down.
2SS Botany Bay
271 years
When the producers ofStar Trekmovies decided to switch to a more action-based plot for the second installment, they picked up a dropped thread from the classic series. The episode “Space Seed” introducedthe lore of the 1990s Eugenics Warsand its most notorious creation, Khan Noonien Singh.
Khan and his followers were exiled into deep space on their primitive ship, which was almost three hundred years old when Kirk and his crew accidentally found it. What followed was a harrowing encounter that only ended when Khan was expelled from the ship with his crew to the precarious planet of Seti Alpha 5 inStar Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, which is where he turned up again just in time to try and steal the Genesis Project.
1V’Ger
300+ years
V’Ger had one of the longest and most interesting trips of all, and it’s ironic that, considering the length of its voyage, humanity never really discovered its secrets. When the vessel was first detected by members of the Federation, it was referred to as “The Intruder,” and its exact nature was unknown.
It was eventually revealed that V’Ger was originally from Earth, specifically one of the Voyager probes launched in 1977. In the centuries that it had travelled the galaxy,it had come in contactwith another intelligent life form or machine, and become something else.
Despite its powerful and highly evolved form, V’Ger was still a machine, and it returned to its home galaxy to find what it considered the final frontier - the mystery of human emotion. It’s a daring story that explores the connections between people, which is something people have been trying to figure out for all of their existence, a trip Earthlings have been on for a few thousand years.
