--- title: Leonard Nimoy Dead: Why Spock and Star Trek Mattered description: Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock on Star Trek, died at 83 canonical: https://time.com/3726374/nimoy-star-trek-mattered/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-02-27T19:16:51.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-11T05:05:20.545Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Why Leonard Nimoy Mattered og:description: The meaning of Spock og:url: https://time.com/3726374/nimoy-star-trek-mattered/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte7880d3e28d5e1a8/6987816c35ba6f0707c07524/leonard-nimoy1.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: Actor Leonard Nimoy, a cast member in the upcoming film "Star Trek", poses for a portrait in Beverly Hills, Calif. on April 26, 2009. og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Why Leonard Nimoy Mattered twitter:description: The meaning of Spock twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte7880d3e28d5e1a8/6987816c35ba6f0707c07524/leonard-nimoy1.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Why Leonard Nimoy Mattered  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Feb 27, 2015 7:16 PM UTC  Actor Leonard Nimoy, a cast member in the upcoming film "Star Trek", poses for a portrait in Beverly Hills, Calif. on April 26, 2009. Actor Leonard Nimoy, a cast member in the upcoming film "Star Trek", poses for a portrait in Beverly Hills, Calif. on April 26, 2009.Matt Sayles—AP  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Feb 27, 2015 7:16 PM UTC If you cared a fig for space travel, it was easy _not_ to care when the first episode of _Star Trek_ aired on Sept. 8, 1966\. Just four days later, Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon would be lifting off for their Gemini 11 mission, which would orbit the earth 44 times in just under three days and set a then unheard-of manned-altitude record of 739 nautical miles (1,369 km). There was still one more Gemini flight to go before NASA could even think of test-flying its Apollo lunar ships—and only a little more than three years left if the U.S. was going to meet President Kennedy’s goal of reaching the moon before 1970. Against that, a group of actors on a pasteboard set pretending to fly in space was pretty small beer. And as for one with the blunt-cut bangs and pointy rubber ears? Please. But the space geeks and critics and TV execs—so many of whom sniffed at _Star Trek_ during the brief three years it ran—were too smart and too cute by half. And [the loss of Leonard Nimoy](http://time.com/3726304/leonard-nimoy-spock-dead/)—who more than any other character captured the romance, the rocket science and the extraordinary wit of the series—is cause again to consider why the show was what it was. _Star Trek’s_ production values—with its wobbly doors and painted rocks and [lizard-like antagonist](http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Arena%5F%28episode%29) with, as a friend of mine once put it, bicycle reflectors for eyes—were entirely beside the point. It was the largeness of the stories _Star Trek_ sought to tell that mattered, and never mind the idea that fever dreams about dilithium crystals and warp drive seemed all wrong for an era in which metal rockets and flesh-and-blood men were actually flying, the timing of the series was perfect. ### See Leonard Nimoy's Long and Prosperous Life in Photos  Leonard Nimoy in The Outer Limits in 1964. ABC/Getty Images  Leonard Nimoy with wife Sandra Zober attend an event in Los Angeles,Calif. in 1966. Michael Ochs Archives—Getty Images  Leonard Nimoy, circa 1968. Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images  Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock and William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk in season 3 of Star Trek in 1968. CBS/Getty Images  Leonard Nimoy as Paris and Lee Meriwether as Tracey in Mission Impossible in 1969. CBS/Getty Images  Leonard Nimoy in Catlow, 1971. Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images  Leonard Nimoy in The Alpha Caper in 1973 Everett  NASA's space shuttle Enterprise rolled out of the Palmdale manufacturing facilities and was greeted by NASA officials and cast members from Star Trek in 1976\. From left: NASA Administrator Dr. James D. Fletcher; DeForest Kelley, who portrayed Dr. "Bones" McCoy on the series; George Takei (Mr. Sulu); James Doohan (Chief Engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott); Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Uhura); Leonard Nimoy (Mr. Spock); series creator Gene Roddenberry; an unnamed NASA official; and, Walter Koenig (Ensign Pavel Chekov). NASA  Leonard Nimoy hosts The Unexplained in 1976. Everett  Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock in 1984. Paramount/Everett  Leonard Nimoy guest stars in The Big Bang Theory. CBS/Getty Images  Leonard Nimoy guest stars on Fringe Fox  Leonard Nimoy and Luke Wilson, presenters during 5th Annual TV Land Awards - Show at Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, Calif. in 2007. Chris Polk—FilmMagic/Getty Images  Leonard Nimoy guest stars as Mr. Spock in Star Trek in 2009. Paramount I was one of those Gemini junkies when _Star Trek_ premiered—a 12-year-old American boy who built model rockets and learned the names of astronauts and whose very first memory was standing on the front lawn looking for Sputnik when I was only 3 years old. I breathed rocket fuel almost from birth. And yes, I was too distracted by the real space program to pay a lot of attention to _Star Trek_ in its original run, but as with so many others, I soon tumbled for it hard. The space program, I came to know and appreciate, was the stuff of increments, of inches (literally when [Gemini 6 and Gemini 7](http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1965-100A) became the first manned American spacecraft to rendezvous in orbit). It was a thing of fixed speeds—17,500 m.p.h. (28,200 km/h) to orbit the earth and 25,000 m.p.h. (32,000 km/h) to escape its gravity. It was a thing of teeth-rattling liftoffs and bone-thumping landings and a dependence on fire—_fire!_, the fuel of the primitives—to get anywhere at all. And, as well, it was a thing of very real and very terrible deaths—as when some of that fire [claimed three of those flesh-and-blood astronauts](http://www.nasa.gov/mission%5Fpages/apollo/missions/apollo1.html#.VPCzObPF-0w), or when two astronauts, who had trained hard and competed hard and made the cut and were chosen to fly, [died before they ever got the chance](http://science.time.com/2013/02/01/nasas-astronaut-day-of-remembrance/slide/charlie-bassett-and-elliott-see/), in a routine airplane accident. Stanley Kubrick, with his huge, brooding [_2001: A Space Odyssey_](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/), released eight months before human beings even orbited the moon, tried to combine the technology of the what-is with the wonder of what-could-be, and so gave us eternal slo-mos of thrusters firing and counter-thrusters responding and astronauts floating and space pods creeping, creeping, creeping toward mother ships. And only then, when you couldn’t take the glacial pace anymore, he blew the whole thing up in a lot of flashing lights and hallucinogenic images about, well, birth or life or death or who knew what and who, after a running time of 160 minutes, cared anymore? _Star Trek_ didn’t take itself nearly so seriously. It was about warp drive because regular physics is just too strict; it was about beaming up and down, because why shouldn’t the molecules that make you up be infinitely scramble-able and unscramble-able? It was about planet after planet with just the right air and just the right temperature because what’s the point of hiring good-looking actors if you can’t see them for the space helmets? And it was—pitilessly, riotously—about the lieutenant in the red shirt who was inevitably going to die on one of those planets before the first commercial because that was just plain good for the story. **MORE:** [How Leonard Nimoy Almost Wasn’t Spock](http://time.com/3726316/leonard-nimoy-dead-spock-history/) The genius of _Star Trek_ was that it saw the high stakes and high price and punishingly hard science of a real space program and forgave us all that. It let us quit the real while still keeping it in sight, to live in a world in which it takes six years to fly from here to Pluto and glimpse a world in which it takes six seconds to reach Alastria, a Delta Quadrant planet that you can get to only with the help of a spatial trajector—whatever that was. And it was Nimoy as Mr. Spock—half-human and half-Vulcan, part-brain and part-savage—who was the literal embodiment of that duality. Spock’s mind would have had no truck with the liberties the _Star Trek_ series took. But his heart would have loved them. We’re better, dreamier, more hopeful spacefarers for having spent time with _Star Trek_. And we’re better too for having had the wise corrective of Nimoy’s Spock to keep us honest while letting us dream. ### See the Cast of Star Trek Then and Now  From left: Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto as Mr. Spock CBS/Getty Images; Paramount  From left: William Shatner and Chris Pine as James T. Kirk Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images; Paramount  From left: DeForest Kelley and Karl Urban as Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy CBS/Getty Images; Paramount  From left: James Doohan and Simon Pegg as Scotty CBS/Getty Images; Paramount  From left: Nichelle Nichols and Zoe Saldana as Nyota Uhura CBS/Getty Images; Paramount  From left: George Takei and John Cho as Hikaru Sulu CBS/Getty Images; Paramount  From left: Walter Koenig and Anton Telchin as Pavel Chekov CBS/Getty Images; Paramount ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/3726374/nimoy-star-trek-mattered/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/3726374/nimoy-star-trek-mattered/"},"headline":"Why Leonard Nimoy Mattered","datePublished":"2015-02-27T19:16:51.000Z","dateModified":"2026-05-11T05:05:20.545Z","description":"The meaning of Spock","url":"https://time.com/3726374/nimoy-star-trek-mattered/","keywords":["Space","Leonard Nimoy"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte7880d3e28d5e1a8/6987816c35ba6f0707c07524/leonard-nimoy1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Jeffrey Kluger","jobTitle":"Editor at Large","url":"https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/"}],"articleSection":"Ideas","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte7880d3e28d5e1a8/6987816c35ba6f0707c07524/leonard-nimoy1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Actor Leonard Nimoy, a cast member in the upcoming film \"Star Trek\", poses for a portrait in Beverly Hills, Calif. on April 26, 2009.","caption":"Actor Leonard Nimoy, a cast member in the upcoming film \"Star Trek\", poses for a portrait in Beverly Hills, Calif. on April 26, 2009.","creditText":"Matt Sayles—AP","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/ideas/","name":"Ideas"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/space/","name":"Space"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/3726374/nimoy-star-trek-mattered/","name":"Why Leonard Nimoy Mattered"}}]}] ```