Star Trek: Enterprise writers Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, whose Race to Mars miniseries begins airing on Canada's Discovery Channel this week, named a character after their friend and colleague Michael Okuda's father.

"Race to Mars is a four hour dramatic mini series...based on what we know now and what we expect to know in the next 25 years or so," said Garfield Reeves-Stevens to TrekMovie.com. "It would best be described as 'predictive fiction.'" The pair became involved after onetime co-writer Brian Muirhead became the chief architect for the Constellation Program, NASA’s plan to put humans on Mars, for which designer Okuda created the mission patch.

"We just started working on this project around the time of the shooting of 'Terra Prime' for Enterprise," Reeves-Stevens continued. "We were using the Paramount theater as an assembly hall for Archer’s speech at the end of the episode and...ran into Lou Friedman of the Planetary Society." The three discussed different plans for getting people to Mars and back.

Unlike Star Trek, which presumes cooperation among nations, the Reeves-Stevens miniseries assumes that competitive spirit might drive humans to try to outdo each other to get to Mars. "Competition and cooperation are joint themes of the series," said Judith Reeves-Stevens.

The pair were careful not to quote Star Trek overmuch, and a reference to Mr. Spock had to be cut when the actor mistakenly said "Dr. Spock" instead.

The Reeves-Stevens team worked with executive producer Manny Coto’ on "Demons" and "Terra Prime", the two Enterprise episodes focused on human colonies on Mars. "Season 4 was so heavily continuity driven and it was great for the fans. But by season 4 the audience had been reduced to just the fans. For whatever reason the audience dropped off the previous years," Garfield Reeves-Stevens lamented. "The context of Star Trek is so huge and there was so much that Enterprise could have done…there is no end of stories." Among their ideas were the origins of the Borg Queen.

The full interview is here.

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