I’ve done megastructures, space war, power armor, and today I’m doing spacecraft! With all these new submarine terms bouncing around in my head, I couldn’t help but think about the spaceborne equivalent. I find it kinda funny that humans have solved two problems, opposites in many ways, in much the same way, at least on a surface level. Going down, you need a pocket of breathable air to survive. How do you do that? Simple, build an airtight container and hope the pressure doesn’t crush it like a bug. You want to go up? Well, same solution, only now you have to hope the vacuum doesn’t make you explode. Oh and the radiation is an issue. And the meteors. And the horrifying effects of low gravity on the human body. And the waste issue. And … you get the point. I think there’s something wonderful about the symmetry in the problems we have to solve just to go exploring where nature never intended us to go. So let’s forge ahead into space, the final frontier, where the only thing separating you and the unforgiving vacuum of space is the hull of a ship built by a bunch of hairless apes running around on a big rock where that really never should have been an issue in the first place.

First off, I just want to constrain the topic here a little. A spacecraft is anything that gets a pilot from place to place. No space stations, no unmanned craft, no satellites.

I think it’s best to start with the real deal, the first spacecraft we ever sent out into the unknown. Well, I think the ol’ reds might have an issue with me claiming the ‘we’ in that sentence, but you know I mean humanity in general, right?

The Vostok 1 wasn’t exactly pretty, but it sure got the job done. It was essentially a tin can with a giant rocket attached to it. Here’s the bigger picture, with what you see above being in nosecone at the tip of the rocket.

Gagarin wasn’t even allowed to pilot the craft due to concerns about the effects of low gravity on the human body. The entire mission was piloted from central command. That someone on the ground would have complete control over my spacecraft during the first reentry ever makes me quake in my boots just thinking about it. I can’t believe Gagarin actually got on this thing.

Alan Shepard, the second man in space, took off not even a month later in a similarly horrifying death trap that he named the Freedom 7.

Here’s the Freedom 7’s successor, the Freedom 7 II, which never flew because the project was cancelled. You could not pay me to sit in this thing for more than an hour, much less ride it through space. Astronauts are really just built different.

Another interesting fact about Alan Shepard is that he’s also the oldest man to have landed on the moon. He brought along a driver and some golf balls too.

If aliens could find any footage of humans, I’d probably send them this. Getting all the way to the moon and taking the time to satisfy the primal curiosity of ‘what would hitting a golf ball on the moon feel like?’ is just too perfectly human to ignore.

There are way too many cool (true to life) spacecraft to cover in this post, so I guess I’ll just throw up my personal favorite as the last one, the Space Shuttle Discovery.

This one is my favorite because I’ve seen it in person, and that makes it way better than a picture on the internet. This hardly does it justice. I highly recommend you swing by the Air and Space Museum in D.C. if you ever get the chance to see this big boy. Over it’s 27 year lifespan it completed 39 missions, more than any other spacecraft. It has close to a year of cumulative space flight. The thing I love about it most is how dirty it looks! All the bits and pieces are worn from the long spaceflight and all those reentries, making it a well used, and very serious veteran of the final frontier.

Since these first steps into the universe we’ve been thinking about bigger and better ways to do it, some of us for our entire lives. Gene Roddenberry put perhaps the most famous spacecraft of all time on screen back in 1964, imagining a future of faster than light travel before we’d even visited the nearest celestial body. The original Enterprise was an 11 foot model that looks awfully hard to move around for filming to me. Nonetheless, it’s very cool.

Personally I’m more partial to the successor though, the Enterprise D from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

As far as story devices go, the Enterprise D is essentially perfect. It’s an exploratory vessel with Star Fleet officers, their families, general staff, civilian explorers, and enough room for all the quirky guests anybody can think up. Thanks to its diverse crew, it gets to go from place to place on military, civilian, and exploratory missions. As far as a real spaceship goes though, I’m not sure a ship with children on board should really be looking into possible Borg activity on a regular basis. It’d be like crewing a sailing ship with your spouse and child and then going off in search of the Kraken. That being said I’d sign up for Enterprise duty in a heartbeat, so maybe it’s not so far off from the truth that it would have so many civilians on board. I might change my tune after the third or fourth mind breaking temporal anomaly though.

Here’s another famous spacecraft, though maybe not like you’ve ever seen it before:

When I saw this picture for the first time I audibly gasped. It makes so much sense seeing it like this. The fact that the Millennium Falcon is just the galaxy’s fastest 18 wheeler makes the entire Star Wars trilogy that much better. Especially when you remember that one scene where Han Solo sneaks up on Darth Vader and blasts him out of the sky. In the space equivalent of a semi truck. Converted for war.

But those are just the basics aren’t they? Everybody knows about the Enterprise and the Falcon. What about some obscure ships that are no less interesting for their obscurity? There is plenty of sci-fi where the ship takes center stage, and not all of it exists in the minds of billions. Can you identify this ship for example?

This is the Moya from an underloved early 2000s show called ‘Farscape.’ Unlike most sci-fi vessels, this ship does not have a single gun on it. Furthermore, it’s alive. The ship itself is a thinking, feeling organism, and plays a big role on show through her symbiotic partner, Pilot, who she speaks through. I think he looks very fitting for the role.

As easily one of the more creative ships out there, I have to give this one big props for the originality, though I’m sure there’s some earlier iteration of this idea that I’m unaware of. It takes the notion that the ship the crew is on is as big a character as the crew itself and pushes it to new heights by making it a literal character. I think this is such a cool way to make your ship a mainstay, and still haven’t gotten over it all these years later.

For ships with lots of character, look no further than the Serenity from ‘Firefly.’ Though cancelled after a very short run in 2003, this ship seems to have a staying power that rivals even the greats that helped spawn entire universes.

I’ve never seen the show myself, but even I’ve heard about this one. Is it sacrilege to call it a little funny looking? That bend in the neck area makes me nervous. Like it’ll break in two if it goes too fast. I don’t know, it does have a certain charm to it, even I think it has something of an ugly duckling look about it.

As far as beauty is concerned I have to give my prettiest ship award to the Normandy from ‘Mass Effect 2.’

This maybe cheating though because this ship is designed as a scouting frigate, and therefore by some unspoken law, must be the coolest design possible. This is the second iteration of the Normandy, boasting a greater volume, higher top speed, and somehow even stealthier design despite it being much bigger than the first one (all according to the people who built it in the game who are, admittedly, terrorists).

Speaking of pretty ships, I do love this one from the recent TV adaptation of ‘The Expanse’ novels.

The Rocinante has a utilitarian thing going on, especially with that huge nozzle at the stern. For a gunship with a small crew, it seems to be at the very heart of everything that happens in the solar system. Funny how that works out. She has all the character you could ask for, and though constantly winding up in a repair dock, she always seems to get the job done.

Those are about all the spacecraft I can think of. What’s your favorite ship to dream about riding over the metaphorical horizon in? Let me know in the comments!

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley