The worst spaceship ever has been featured in a new sci-fi show
By Joshua Tyler | Published: 2025-11-03 18:26:00 | Source: GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT
Written by Joshua Tyler | Published
Spaceships are one of the best things in science fiction. When done right, they become cultural icons, like the USS Enterprise.
It’s not about whether your ship is ugly or not. Sometimes ugly is exactly what you want. Ships like the Serenity and Millennium Falcon look intentionally weird and unattractive. Giving them that aesthetic makes them the lovable underdogs you want to root for.
Sometimes ugly and stupid are just ugly and stupid. When a fantasy spaceship is poorly designed, it’s usually because the ship in question is part of a science fiction project that’s as bad as it gets. However, the worst sci-fi vehicle ever created is, somehow, not part of the worst piece of sci-fi ever. It’s kind of a good, new science fiction series called Astronomy.
Astronomy A second season has aired, and it is not yet clear whether the series will get a third season. Produced by SyFy and streaming on Peacock, Astronomy It was a modest success. With the end of the shows like Extension, Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Discoveryand Star Trek: Lower DecksIt is one of the only outer space sci-fi shows still in production.
Before we look at the gruesome exterior of this flying nightmare that serves as the series’ main setting, we need to explain why it exists.
Astronomy hypothesis
Astronomy The film is set in a future where Earth is rapidly becoming uninhabitable. The whys and hows of this happen aren’t that important and aren’t fully explored through the show. What matters is that humans need a new home, so the Ark program was designed to build ships that would take us elsewhere.
The series begins on board the Ark One, flying through space mid-mission. The crew is in stasis throughout the long voyage, a disaster strikes, and most of the command crew are killed. The survivors wake up, leaving only junior officers and civilians remaining.
The show follows their journey to reach their destination, with the odds stacked against them. It’s basically a rerun of the forgotten 1970s sci-fi series Starlost.
Ark One’s awesome design
If you’ve seen the interiors of Ark One, you might not think the ship is too bad. The interior design is generic, white, futuristic stuff.
Sure, the bridge looks like desktop computers sitting on foldable card tables, but it’s easy to overlook. When shooting from the right angles, these problems are not noticeable.
From the outside, Ark One is a complete disaster.
The aesthetic failings of this design can be dismissed as resulting from an attempt at realism. This excuse won’t work, because that’s not what’s happening.
For example, those rotating rings may appear to exist to create gravity with centrifugal force. They are not. This is where the stasis capsules were kept. Once everyone woke up, they would never go to that section of the ship again. Instead, the crew spends all their time in parts of the ship without any gravity causing them to spin, yet there seems to be a lot of gravity in them.
So why spinning rings then? I have no idea, they’re just there, and no one on the ship ever mentions them.
This is the case with most Ark One. Nothing in it serves any purpose. ship The hero ship is a collection of ill-defined pieces piled together for no reason. The people inside the ship don’t seem to know most of it, outside of the command area at the front and the very strange bio-dome at the top.
By the way, biodom doesn’t make any sense. When the crew runs out of food, they decide to grow crops there, because it is a large, open space. Why was there a large, empty, dome-shaped area on top of the ship? It was never processed.
The dome was not originally designed for growing plants, as it is not transparent to allow light to pass through. Whoever designed the ship saw that it needed a large, empty dome attached to it, in a way that would make it completely exposed and easy to damage.
It is also unclear why the ship has stasis pods or why the entire crew sleeps in them. Once the accident awakens them, they appear to be able to activate the ship’s hyperspace drive and get to almost anywhere within a few days or hours. In fact, throughout their journey, they encounter other ugly and downright stupid ships, all of which have fully active and awake crews.
If there’s anything good about the Ark One’s design, I think it’s really memorable. Bad starship designs are usually bad because they are boring or generic. The design team may not have thought much about it, but the Ark One isn’t boring.
Ark One’s failed aesthetic spreads like a virus
They also encounter another type of ship, which is ugly in a completely different way. It looks like a flying brick with weapon pods attached to it. At least it doesn’t have meaningless loops.
This brick ship was created for the second season of Astronomy. By then, the series’ producers must have known that the ships they were designing were terrible and ugly. This knowledge should have led to a radical change in direction. Instead, they kept the aesthetic of Ark One and painted it on a spacefaring block of ash.
The ship shows its ship with bad music
So Ark One is stupid, ugly, and pointless. Normally, with a ship this bad, any standard sci-fi show would try to hide that. After all, maybe they had a budget problem and couldn’t solve it. They built the bridge out of folding tables, after all.
no.
The team is on Astronomy He thinks this is a good ship. We know this because they created an opening sequence dedicated solely to showing off the show’s terrible ship. And then, somehow, they managed to find music that sounded as terrible as Ark One sounds.
Why is bad design such a big problem?
Ark One Design is a huge problem for the show, one that’s impossible to solve at this point given that almost every moment of every story takes place aboard the Ark One. This is unfortunate because, as I said at the beginning, no matter how stupid a ship is, Astronomy Not that bad.
Give it a few more seasons to dial things in, and I can even see the show becoming great. But it’s almost impossible to convince someone to watch it if the first thing they see when they turn it on looks this bad.
At least the shuttles aren’t terrible.
The ship does other things right
I want to stop complaining here and give the team a chance to work Astronomy Some praise. Although I think this is the worst ship design in the history of science fiction, bad music aside, the way the show team uses it is great.
Ark One is always well lit, so it’s easy to see. There are no cheat shadows to hide bad CGI. Space shots are plentiful and well framed.
Astronomy He does a great job of showing the audience what’s going on inside and outside the ship. The show is particularly good at using exterior establishing shots to focus the audience on where the action is taking place inside the ship. Much of the direction of the show, from episode to episode, is top notch.
You shouldn’t blame the special effects team for Ark One’s problems. They are doing the best job they can in a situation where they are burdened with such a terrible design. The design of the Ark One is the problem, not the execution of the show.
It makes this problem even more frustrating. If the ship had been well designed, its use could have led to some of the best space sci-fi scenes ever shown on television.
What went wrong? Ship designer speaks
But wishes won’t fix it, and the ship is no good. It wasn’t good from the first moment someone drew it on a piece of paper. So, what really went wrong here?
The ship was designed by Randall Groves, who gave some interviews, apparently unaware that he had caused an embarrassment. Groves claims that the design was the result of an attempt to achieve scientific accuracy, and seems unaware that there is nothing accurate about this ship.
Reading between the lines, it seems that the original plan for the show was to have parts of the ship where the crew is weightless. However, when it came time to film, they didn’t have the budget to actually do it, so Astronomy He nullified it and went with artificial gravity all over the ship.
Unfortunately, they also didn’t have the budget to modernize the ship to fit their new, more budget-friendly script. This could explain why Ark One is illogical, but it doesn’t explain why it’s ugly.
Groves says he delved into films such as… star wars, Silent running and Black hole To investigate what this future world might look like. I don’t see any Star Wars in it, however Silent running Makes sense for reference. This movie’s ship is also a contender for the ugliest sci-fi brutality.
Groves says they also aim to blend the “clean aesthetic” of Space So is it Elon Musk’s fault?
Give the ship a chance
how Astronomy He arrives on TV with a hero ship this stupid and ugly, and will likely always be something of a mystery. Do your best to ignore it and watch the show anyway. Because, really, Astronomy It’s kind of good.
In an age when new space sci-fi options are so limited on TV, it’s worth supporting, even if the ship is stupid and ugly.
(tags for translation)Peacock
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