Star Trek: Everything We Know About Starfleet Academy

The official 2023 announcement of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy was hardly a surprise, but it was a nice bit of news. Displayed in a 'calling all future cadets' e-poster style, probably to be placarded in high schools across the galaxy — Zefram, Archer, or otherwise — the recruitment pitch also included the following, vital piece of information: "For the first time in over a century, our campus will be re-opened…" Though we'd technically have to wait for absolute, concrete confirmation, it seemed a fairly safe bet that Starfleet Academy would be a 32nd-century programme.

We could have such relative assurance as we'd already learnt about an equally lengthy gap in the curriculum in Star Trek: Discovery's fourth season. In its aptly titled first episode Kobayashi Maru, we saw Michael Burnham welcome the very newest batch of future officers to the Academy, which had been closed for 125 years after the big bang of the Burn of the 31st century. Only a few episodes later, Lieutenant Tilly was drafted as an instructor.

Of course, any fictional future has a lot of potential for history to repeat itself, so it wasn't until Variety reported in March 2024 that "Starfleet Academy [was] set in the 32nd century" that we knew for sure. Later, in May, Alex Kurtzman explained the reasoning behind the choice of the next millennium to the LA Times, noting that, to set the show in "the halcyon days of the Federation" wouldn't feel "authentic" when compared to a world filled with uncertainty that today's younger generation must face.

The more "authentic" setting, by comparison, to Kurtzman's mind, was the post-Burn world, which was only just emerging from that cataclysm. There, the new students of the Academy would be the "first class back after over 100 years," and the first to "re-inherit the task of exploration as a primary goal". Well, that and (presumably) a whole lot of reading!