Shuttlecraft

The Galileo-type shuttlecraft makes its first appearance in 1989’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. The plot required—and the budget allowed—the folks making the movie to build full-scale models of the shuttle as well as Enterprise’s shuttle bay. They made good use of both. Galileo (screencap from TrekCore) The folk working on Star Trek: The Next Generation—about halfway through its seven-year run at the time—jumped at the opportunity to re-use models and sets the film had already paid for, despite the film being set ~75 years earlier. Apparently the Type 7 shuttle which TNG already had was extremely difficult to work with. Type-7 shuttle from TNG S2E1 The Child (TrekCore) Redressing Galileo’s models and sets gave the various 24th-century Treks the Type 6, 6A, and 8 shuttles. Back on earth, engineers at Toyota were hard at work on what would become the first generation Previa minivan. It seems clear to me that the Previa and the TNG-era shuttles are both products whose design is very…