Mike Nevitt’s five-year mission is to go where no man has gone before and build a detailed 1:25-scale model of the USS Enterprise from the original “Star Trek” TV series.
“The model will be 40 feet long and 11 feet high,” Mike said the other day on a Zoom call from Denmark, where the 59-year-old lives. “So it's actually the biggest in the world.”
Or it will be when he’s done. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy on the United States going to the moon: Mike does it not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
He’s been at it for about six months, posting regular updates on his Mr. Trek YouTube channel. So far, Mike’s concentrating on the interior, creating detailed test-models of corridors, crew quarters and shuttle craft hangars. The living room of his Copenhagen apartment is full of virgin cardboard, colored markers, X-ACTO knives and roughed-out wedges of the Enterprise’s distinctive saucer-shaped main hull.
I asked Mike what his family and friends think.
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“They think I’m nuts,” he said. “They do. But in a well-meaning way. And I am actually nuts, in a way.”
Building a 1:25-scale model of the Enterprise, Mike said, “is crazy, but it's crazy in the best of ways. For me, what would be crazy would be just to go to a regular job where I’m driving to work, doing a 9-to-5 job, and driving back home again. I couldn’t do that.”
Mike has lived in Denmark for 14 years. He’s originally from Manchester in England.
“Where I grew up in the U.K. was considered quite a rough environment,” he said.
It was a poor part of town, a black-and-white world as different from the colorful universe of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock as it was possible to be.
“When I saw ‘Star Trek,’ wow, it just hit me straight away,” Mike said. “I saw this group of really cool adults doing really cool things on this really cool space ship.”
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He made his first scratch-built model at age 8, building the interior of a space ship inside an empty cornflakes box. When he held the box up to his eyes and peered inside, it was magical, almost like being aboard.
Mike studied art in college then became a graphic designer, working with ad agencies. He continued to dabble with models, eventually realizing he had the skills to build one of the most iconic science-fictional structures ever created: NCC-1701, the USS Enterprise, constructed in the 23rd century to explore strange new worlds.
For Mike, this has become a full-time endeavor. Along the way, he’s made a few discoveries of his own. While fiddling around with some Apple AirPods, he turned one of the ear tips inside out. It looked to him like a tiny toilet bowl. And so he incorporated an inverted ear tip into a crew quarters bathroom.
He’s going to need a lot more AirPods. Though the (fictional) crew of the (fictional) Enterprise numbered 430, Mike’s model will have more than 1,000 toilets, installed in staterooms, the sick bay, engineering, rec rooms and the like.
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This has prompted much conversation in the online community that’s following his project. Some call it toilet overkill. “A modern aircraft carrier has around 500” toilets, one nitpicker wrote, and that’s for a crew of more than 5,000.
“One of the things I’m always trying to get across is that the USS Enterprise is not an aircraft carrier,” Mike said. “It’s not a submarine.”
It’s a vessel that deploys for years at a time in deepest, darkest space, literal light-years from the nearest port.
“One of my primary considerations is the mental health of the crew onboard a starship,” he said. “You’re looking out the window and it's black. You're going to have to be in a pretty awesome environment to not go a bit nuts with stress and anxiety.”
And so on Mike’s Enterprise, everyone gets their own toilet. What’s more, every crew member’s quarters will have a sauna, too.
Watching Mike’s videos, it’s hard not to be as enthusiastic as he is. He moves his video camera along a corridor and into a conference room, and suddenly we’re in a familiar place. There’s the table, the chairs (now retro), the computer thingies …
Mike is making his proof-of-concept models from cardboard. The final version will be architectural foam and wood. He hopes to bring on two or three people to help him. He’s raising money through a Patreon account. Donors will get their own 1:25-scale rooms aboard the ship, decorated with a few personalized miniature items.
As for where this big, heavy thing will go when he’s done, that has yet to be determined.
Mike says he was a bit of an outsider at school.
“Every time the bell rang and we ran into the playground, other people would start kicking the ball around,” he said.
Not Mike. “Who wants to play Star Trek?” he’d shout, ready to explore planets unknown.
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