Star Trek: Every Starship Enterprise Ranked From WORST To BEST
4. NCC-1701 (Matt Jefferies)
When Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek, he originally pitched a ship named the SS Yorktown. This ship would contain a crew as diverse as the planet on which Gene lived. It would, in essence, be Starship Earth. That ship morphed from Yorktown to Enterprise and, with a design from Matt Jefferies, the flight into the final frontier began to take shape.
Though there have been several variations on the theme, the design that Jefferies delivered in 1964 for The Cage has remained the blueprint for almost everything that has followed. The saucer section, those warp nacelles, and that cylindrical secondary hull are as much a part of pop culture now as any other design one cares to mention.
Stories arose of the ship being presented upside down, of spherical hulls, and of ringed propulsion systems (all of which have both merit and would later appear in various forms), but the winning design has remained one of the enduring configurations in Star Trek. When the ship was refit for the films, it was largely unchanged, though more surface details were added.
The filming model for the Enterprise now resides in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., and is a beautiful sight to behold.