I'm Richard Sternbach. I've worked on Star Trek for a number of years as senior illustrator. Let me show you some of the designs and sketches that were produced during the seven years of [Star Trek Voyager].

The Ares IV, the Mars orbiter from [#128 One Small Step], was a great chance to look back to the NASA days and to see what the Mars orbiting craft might look like. We might not actually get to Mars in that particular way, but the story required one astronaut to be in orbit, very much like Apollo 11, and two explorers down on the surface. John Kelly, left alone in this very big ship, and this was a story paralleling our moonflights, when I heard that we were going to be doing a Mars ship I started rubbing my hands together, because we had excellent references on NASA hardware. And I knew that if we plugged a pair of engines on the back of a big fuel tank and a habitat module and a command module and lots of antennas and some cargo containers, I thought we'd have a pretty neat ship to show going around Mars.

Ares IV undamaged exterior, [#128 One Small Step]

Ares IV - design drawings

Ares IV - design drawings

initial CGI mock-up of the Ares IV undamaged exterior

Ares IV. Picture TOSTFF, scanned by Ex Astris Scientia