UESPA Changed to Starfleet When and Why?

I think Basil hit the nail on the head. We already live in a world where many of us have jobs that require us to serve many different masters, and where we must answer to many different authorities. It's not at all likely that things will be all that different in the 23rd Century.

I have no problem with a Star Trek universe where both Starfleet and UESPA coexist, along with a whole slew of other galactic and regional institutions and authorities that Kirk must sometimes answer to as his ship travels from one region of space to another.

Perhaps on those early occasions when Kirk asked Uhura to contact some authority other than "Starfleet" (Such as "Space Central" or "Space Fleet Command"), it was simply because that was the official body that managed affairs in the particular region of space that the Enterprise was currently traveling through. Later in the series, we can assume that the reason that these regional authorities seemingly dissappeared, is that Federation influence was expanding, and more and more of these regional authorities were being replaced by, or absorbed into, Starfleet and the Federation itself.

 

It is also possible for Kirk to have nicknames for parts of the Starfleet organization - the way naval people today may speak of "DoD", "Pentagon" or "the Navy Wing" and mean the exact same thing. Use of nicknames may have been something the young captain soon grew out of.

Of course, given the context of "Miri", Kirk may have wanted the ship to contact Starfleet's Central Space Hospital, reporting on a possible large scale use of bioweapons as a matter of standard procedure...

Yeah, Crusher picks that nation at random, but she does pick Australia from a pool of nations that had not joined by 2150. The way the thing is phrased, we cannot tell whether everybody joined in a big crunch on Dec 31, 2150, or whether the process began a century earlier and Australia was among those few (or those many) that had not joined by Dec 31, 2150. I merely reserve the right to speculate that the latter happened - which would explain how there can be a UESPA in the late 2060s.

Of course, UESPA may originally have meant "Union Europeénne Spatial Pour Astrographie", and the name could later change while the acronym does not (cf. NACA/NASA, or DASA/DASA). But the existence of a nascent United Earth in 2067 is by no means precluded, and indeed Riker and Troi in their pep talk to Cochrane indicate that all the goody-goodness of United Earth will come to be within 50 years of 2063 already.

Timo Saloniemi

 

I think the writers didn't have it all figured out until the end of the first season and now people are trying relentlessly to shoehorn all the missteps into canon as if it was meant to really happen.

 

Well, what is the alternative? To accept that Trek is incomplete, that it doesn't plausibly emulate a reality, even a fictional one?

I'm not sure Trek deserves to exist as a collection of standalone stories. A major part of its allure is the fictional reality it erects for us, and this reality often carries us over the meh-worthy episodes or seasons or entire lackluster spinoff shows. IMHO, it's a worthwhile effort to try and see Trek continuity in a positive light, and to reinforce it rather than tear it apart.

Timo Saloniemi

 

UESPA existed by 2067 and was still around in one form or another as part of or an administrative agency of Starfleet(probably coordinating Earth-based, Sector 001 ships and stations)as late as 2267, so we have something of a definitive time frame even if we were never given a date for its dissolution or cancellation as an agency.

 

I see UESPA as being like NASA under the Air Force or in this case Star Force (aka) Star Fleet, if you get my meaning that is.

- W -
* Nothing to see here, move along, move along *