Will 'Enterprise' have more science? What will it be like?

The new series will probably be more grounded in science than any of our other series, simply because science is at the centre of what we're doing. We've chosen to go back, two hundred years before Voyager and Next Generation, and a hundred years before Captain Kirk and the original Starship Enterprise. We've chosen this era so that we can go back and see how it all began, see the formation of Star Fleet and Man's first steps out into the universe at a time when they're not all that good at it, when they don't take anything for granted, like Jean Luc Picard might. Every day is something new and something a little scary and something a little fascinating.

We did a film a few years ago called First Contact, which ended with the Vulcans making contact with Earth. This story takes place ninety years later. Over that ninety years, the Vulcans have been on Earth, but they've been very hesitant about helping us. They're not very impressed with us, and don't think that we're really ready to step out into the galaxy. So the Vulcans have meted out assistance to us over the last ninety years, and it's been extremely frustrating for all the people involved in science and for the attempts to get a better engine, so that they can see the galaxy.

This is all based on the fact that when Zefram Cochrane, at the end of First Contact, makes his warp flight, he is travelling at Warp 1, the speed of light. But it's made very clear in the pilot of our new series, that at Warp 1 you're going so slowly, that the number of inhabited planets that are within a week or a month or even a year's journey, are very, very few, and that we really can't step out into space until we have an engine capable of going at least Warp 5. So, as we pick up the series, this ninety year period of trying to develop the Warp 5 engine has finally come to fruition. And against the better judgement of the Vulcans, an event occurs that causes us to launch the new ship a little bit earlier than we should.