“Space: the final frontier.” Those four words first came through American living rooms on September 8, 1966, when NBC aired a strange new show about a starship crew on a five-year mission. Star Trek turned 60 this fall. It never won the ratings war in its own day, and NBC canceled it after three seasons and 79 episodes in 1969. Then reruns found the audience the network had missed, and the fans who grew up on them built conventions, cartoons and movies around a crew most of us can still name in order.
Creator Gene Roddenberry died in 1991, but his crew carried the show for decades after he was gone. Sixty years after that first warp jump, the bridge has grown quiet, and only a few of the original faces are still with us. Here is what became of every main member of the Enterprise crew, starting with the ones we have lost and ending with the three who are still beaming in.
Is Leonard Nimoy still alive?
Leonard Nimoy gave television its most famous pair of ears as Mr. Spock, the half-Vulcan science officer who answered chaos with one raised eyebrow. He wrestled with the role for years. He titled his 1975 memoir I Am Not Spock and then made peace with his alter ego in a second book, I Am Spock, in 1995. In between, he joined Mission: Impossible for two seasons and directed Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home before scoring a box office smash with Three Men and a Baby in 1987. He also published poetry and built a serious second career as a photographer.
Nimoy died on February 27, 2015, at his home in Bel Air at age 83, from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He had quit smoking decades earlier but still blamed the habit, and he spent his last year urging fans to stop. A few days before he died, he posted a line on Twitter that fans still quote: “A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP.” William Shatner, born just four days before him in March 1931, said simply, “I loved him like a brother.” His son Adam has kept that memory alive too, and recalled growing up on the Star Trek set in a story we shared this year.
Is DeForest Kelley still alive?
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Before he was Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, DeForest Kelley spent years as a heavy in westerns, playing outlaws and gunmen in films like Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. The Georgia preacher’s son, born January 20, 1920, brought a Southern warmth to the ship’s doctor that balanced Spock’s logic, and his exasperated “He’s dead, Jim” became one of the show’s best-loved lines. He appeared in all six films with the original cast and handed the torch to a new generation in 1987, when he played an elderly Admiral McCoy in the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Kelley mostly stepped away from acting after the films, and he was proud of what the role had meant. “That’s something that very few people can say they’ve done,” he told the Houston Chronicle in 1998. “I’m proud to say that I have.” He died of stomach cancer on June 11, 1999, at the Motion Picture and Television Country House in Woodland Hills, California. He was 79, and he was the first of the main crew to go.
Is James Doohan still alive?
Every time Kirk barked for more power, it was James Doohan’s Montgomery Scott who found it. The Vancouver native had already lived a life of real drama before Hollywood. As a Canadian artillery officer, he landed at Juno Beach on D-Day, and that night he was hit by six rounds of friendly fire. A silver cigarette case stopped one bullet aimed at his chest, but another took off his right middle finger, which he often hid on camera. At his audition he tried out several accents, and when Roddenberry asked which one he liked best, Doohan picked the Scottish brogue: “If you want an engineer, in my experience the best engineers are Scotsmen.” He later insisted, “Scotty is ninety-nine percent James Doohan and one percent accent.”
Doohan was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease late in life and retired from public appearances in 2004, after fans gathered in Hollywood to watch him receive his star on the Walk of Fame. He died at his home in Redmond, Washington, on July 20, 2005, at 85. His final trip was one only Scotty could have planned. Portions of his ashes flew on memorial rocket flights, including a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch in 2012.
Is Majel Barrett still alive?
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Majel Barrett was there before the Enterprise ever reached the air. In the rejected 1964 pilot, “The Cage,” she played the ship’s unnamed first officer, Number One. When the show was retooled, she came back as Nurse Christine Chapel, quietly carrying a torch for Spock. She married Gene Roddenberry in a Shinto ceremony in Tokyo on August 6, 1969, just weeks after the series ended, and she spent the rest of her life as the first lady of Star Trek.
Later generations knew her as the flamboyant Betazoid ambassador Lwaxana Troi on The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, and as the calm voice of the ship’s computer across nearly every series and most of the films. Barrett died of leukemia at her Bel Air home on December 18, 2008, at age 76. She had already recorded the computer’s lines for J.J. Abrams’s 2009 Star Trek, so audiences heard her voice on the big screen months after she was gone.
Is Grace Lee Whitney still alive?
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Yeoman Janice Rand, with her famous basket-weave hairdo, was meant to be a fixture on the bridge. Instead, Grace Lee Whitney appeared in eight of the first 15 episodes before her contract was ended in the show’s first season, and she was never invited back to the series. The years that followed were hard ones. She later wrote openly about her struggles with alcohol and drugs, and she got sober in 1981 with help from a 12-step program, then spent decades helping others do the same.
The fans never forgot her, and neither did the franchise. Whitney returned as Rand in Star Trek: The Motion Picture and three more films, and she reprised the role once more on Star Trek: Voyager in 1996. She died of natural causes on May 1, 2015, at her home in Coarsegold, California, at 85. It was barely two months after Nimoy.
Is Nichelle Nichols still alive?
Lieutenant Nyota Uhura nearly left the Enterprise after one season. Nichelle Nichols had handed Roddenberry her resignation to pursue Broadway, and that weekend she was introduced to a fan at an NAACP event who turned out to be Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As she later told the New York Post, King told her, “You can’t do that. You have the first non-stereotypical, non-menial role on television.” She stayed. In the 1968 episode “Plato’s Stepchildren,” she and Shatner shared one of the first interracial kisses on American scripted television.
Her influence reached well past Hollywood. Starting in the late 1970s, Nichols worked with NASA to recruit women and people of color into the astronaut corps, and the people who answered that call included Sally Ride and Guion Bluford. She was diagnosed with dementia in 2018 and withdrew from public life. Nichols died of heart failure on July 30, 2022, in Silver City, New Mexico, at 89, and in January 2024 a portion of her ashes was launched toward deep space on a memorial flight that also carried remains of Majel Barrett and Gene Roddenberry.
Is George Takei still alive?
Yes. George Takei, who steered the Enterprise as helmsman Hikaru Sulu, is 89. Born in Los Angeles on April 20, 1937, he was a small boy when his family was sent to Japanese American internment camps during World War II, and that childhood shaped everything he did after the show. When Business Insider looked back at the cast for the 60th anniversary, it noted that Takei had told Mother Jones the parts open to Asian American actors in those years were “thin, stereotyped, one-dimensional roles.” Sulu was a rare exception, and he finally got his own command as captain of the Excelsior in Star Trek VI.
Takei has kept busy ever since. He drew on his family’s story for the Broadway musical Allegiance in 2015 and wrote a children’s memoir, My Lost Freedom, published in 2024, followed by the graphic memoir It Rhymes with Takei in 2025. He married his longtime partner, Brad Altman, in 2008, with Walter Koenig standing beside him as best man. This summer he joined Shatner to talk about how Star Trek became a family tradition, and at San Diego Comic-Con in July he honored his old shipmate Nichelle Nichols during the franchise’s 60th anniversary panel.
Is Walter Koenig still alive?
Yes, and he just reached a milestone. Walter Koenig, who joined the crew in the second season as Ensign Pavel Chekov, turned 90 on September 14, 2026. Born in Chicago in 1936, he brought the youthful navigator to the bridge in 1967 and stayed for all six original-cast films, insisting along the way that just about everything worth having was “inwented in Russia.” Behind the camera, he wrote for television too, including an episode of the animated Star Trek and scripts for Land of the Lost.
A whole new audience met him in the 1990s as the menacing Psi Cop Alfred Bester on Babylon 5, a role he played in 12 episodes. His life has also known deep sorrow, because his son, actor Andrew Koenig, died in 2010. He received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2012, and according to Business Insider, he still works the Star Trek convention circuit and takes the occasional film role, including the indie comedy Raging Midlife. He and Takei remain close friends nearly six decades after they first shared a bridge.
Is William Shatner still alive?
Yes, and at 95 he may be the busiest man in this story. William Shatner was born in Montreal on March 22, 1931, and for three seasons he was Captain James T. Kirk, the swaggering heart of the show. After Star Trek, he became T.J. Hooker, hosted Rescue 911, and won Emmys playing lawyer Denny Crane, and in 2021, at 90, he finally flew to space for real aboard a Blue Origin rocket.
This year he revealed a fight he had kept private. Shatner told People that he was diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma in June 2023 while his daughter Melanie was battling stage 4 breast cancer, and that doctors warned him, “If you came in later, you would have been dead.” According to Consequence, surgery and two years of immunotherapy followed, and both father and daughter were declared cancer free by late 2024. They now host a podcast together, No Time But Now, about health and longevity, and you can read more about their shared battle here.
Then he did something no one saw coming. On September 20, Shatner took the stage at Chicago’s Riot Fest fronting his own heavy metal band, tearing through covers like “Crazy Train” and “Ace of Spades” alongside songs from an upcoming metal album, as Blabbermouth reported. “I have explored space. I have explored time,” he wrote before the show. “Now … I explore distortion.”
Sixty years after a captain first called a crew to the bridge, three of them are still answering. Looking back on the scare that could have ended it all, Shatner gave People a line that sounds a little like Kirk and a little like a grateful grandfather: “I think the universe is taking care of me.”
