Roddenberry had been a World War II bomber pilot, a commercial airline pilot, and a police officer before turning to television writing by the 1960s. Although not a science fiction fan, he recognized that the genre could be used to shed light on social problems that might be too sensitive when addressed in other television genres.

Roddenberry sought to employ some of the public enthusiasm generated by Kennedy’s support for human spaceflight to help launch a new science fiction show that he had been developing.

In 1964, Roddenberry began filming “The Cage,” the pilot for a proposed new television series called Star Trek. Pitched to network executives as a “Wagon Train to the stars”—a reference to a popular episodic television Western—it offered a natural extension to President Kennedy’s “New Frontier” rhetoric and also relied heavily upon NASA for inspiration and even imagery.

In the pilot, the crew of the Enterprise receives a distress call from the fourth planet in the Talos star system. After beaming down to the planet’s surface, the landing party discovers survivors from an expedition who had been missing for eighteen years. Among the survivors is a beautiful young woman named Vina who manages to lure Captain Christopher Pike into a trap. After being captured, it turns out that everything except for Vina are just illusions created by the Talosians, a race of humanoids with giant pulsating heads and powerful telepathic abilities who live beneath the planet’s barren surface. During Pike’s imprisonment, he learns that the Talosians seek to repopulate their decimated planet using himself and Vina as breeding stock to create a race of slaves, as well as psychologically entertain themselves. The crew of the Enterprise tries to rescue the captain, and during this time, the Talosians glean records from the Enterprise’s computer banks which, among other things, show how much the human race despises captivity. With this new knowledge, the Talosians eventually let the Captain and the rest of his crew go, but Vina remains as it is learned that she cannot leave the planet. Vina was the sole survivor of the expedition, but was badly injured when they crashed on the surface. The Talosians were able to save her but she was badly “broken.” Because they had no knowledge about human physiology, they had no idea how to put her back together again, and as a result, she was horribly disfigured. The episode closes with the Talosians showing Vina to the departing crew as an illusion of perfect health and beauty with telepathically created Captain Pike by her side.

During the sequence when the Talosians are going through the Enterprise’s computer records, multiple images flash across one of the bridge view screens. It turns out that many of these images were taken from original NASA documents that were seen and approved by Roddenberry.