These errors — of measurement, of understanding, of timing — are the ordinary errors of people working in commercial entertainment, trying to make decisions with incomplete information about which of the many ambitious creative projects they fund will turn out to matter. Most don’t. The ones that do tend to have been made by people who were willing to tolerate the uncertainty long enough to find out.
Lucille Ball tolerated the uncertainty long enough. She kept *Star Trek* alive at the specific moment when it might have died, exercising the authority that decades of work in the entertainment industry had given her. The ship she saved has been exploring the future ever since.
## The Records That Survived
One practical consequence of Desilu’s corporate structure — and of the sale to Gulf + Western that turned Desilu into Paramount Television — is that the production records of *Star Trek’s* original run are institutional archives rather than personal ones. The memos, budgets, correspondence, and contracts that document the decisions described in this article are held within corporate record systems that have passed through multiple owners and have been accessible to researchers in varying degrees over the decades.
The primary written accounts of the production — Herb Solow and Robert Justman’s *Inside Star Trek: The Real Story* (1996); the various memoirs of cast members; the authorized histories of the franchise; the oral history interviews collected in books and documentaries over the decades — are the main sources for the specific anecdotes and decisions described here. Each of these sources has its limitations: memories fifty years old, accounts written by participants who have institutional interests in how they are remembered, reconstructions that fill gaps in documentary evidence with plausible inference.