Every Star Trek fan knows that ye canna change the laws of physics. But if you're director J.J. Abrams, you can change the U.S.S. Enterprise.

For the new movie, designers wanted to give the original NCC-1701 a "hot rod" look. The sleek curves and stylized interior will no doubt raise a few pointy eyebrows. Abrams has said the revamped bridge—a blur of bright white walls, flashing lights, and broad expanses of chrome and glass—makes the modernistic Apple store look "uncool." (Apple store fans may not agree.)

We asked the film's designers and model-makers how they re-imagined the iconic starship, and talked to a NASA engineer about the ways the ship does and does not fit current standards of spacecraft design.

How It Looks: The basic shape of the ship has stayed the same since the original series premiered in 1966: an oval body connected to two tubular nacelles (or engine casings) held at the sides like stiff wings, topped with a flat saucer section "head."

The irony is that, to make sure the ship would resemble the classic while looking futuristic to 21st-century eyes, production designer Scott Chambliss and his team turned to the architecture of the 1950s.

Inspiration for the ship's new look—tapered nacelles with fan-shaped supports attached to a swanlike body—came from the designs of architect Eero Saarinen, famous for creating, among other gems, the simple, sweeping arc of the St. Louis Gateway Arch and the flowing, asymmetric curves and bright, clean colors of Dulles airport and JFK's TWA Flight Center.

“The TWA terminal at JFK was my notion for what the Starfleet world epitomized, which J.J. embraced fully. It was his idea to apply that sensibility to the entire Starfleet universe," Chambliss said via email.

For die-hard fans, including long-time Trek model-maker John Goodson of Industrial Light and Magic, the retrofit can take some getting used to.

In past Star Trek movies, for example, the ship's bridge has resembled a military conference room, with leather chairs, wood railings, and blandly neutral colors. "The [new] bridge has grown on me," Goodson admitted. "It's quite a departure from where we've gone before—so clean and slick."

Overall, Goodson said, the Enterprise has long been modeled more like a Navy ship than a NASA spacecraft.

"For a lot of this stuff, we try to sell people on the idea that these things are real, but real relative to what?" he asked. An aircraft carrier is simply the best analog for a craft that can carry hundreds of officers on missions that last for years.

Most of the previous ships' exterior markings have therefore been the purely functional patterns common on military vessels: lines and lights to show where to dock a shuttle and staccato instructions for how to access control panels.

The 2009 model has a few flashier touches, but the Enterprise's military heritage remains. Look closely during the construction scene during the new flick, Goodson hints, and you can just see the same patterned lines denoting the engineering hull that have appeared on every Enterprise since the 1960s.

Where It's Built: In a shipyard smack in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, and that may be the production decision that sent notoriously techie Trek fans howling the loudest. For starters, you'd need a ginormous amount of thrust just to get a multi-ton craft like that off the ground.

At 240 feet long and about 900 metric tons, the International Space Station is the largest human-built spacecraft today. Getting the ISS whole into orbit would have meant building a launcher with the power of six Saturn V rockets.

That's why NASA figured it made more sense to send the station up in pieces via rockets or the space shuttle and have astronauts build it in orbit. Star Trek fiction often mimics this approach, recording the Enterprise as being built in pieces on Earth and assembled at an orbiting shipyard.

Mark Uhran, NASA's senior systems integration manager for the ISS, offers what sounds like a logical solution: "Maybe they built a transporter to beam it from the ground to space," he theorizes. Or maybe building the Enterprise in Iowa was simply a key part of the storytelling.

"I think we built the ship on Earth," Chambliss said, "so that Kirk, as a total twenty-something screw-up, could ride up on his motorcycle all bruised as Hell, and see the Enterprise in construction and feel, 'Wow. This is where I'm supposed to go.'"

What It's Made Of: Trek science says starship hulls are made of duranium, an extremely strong metal used in various alloys.

The catch is that it doesn’t exist. In a pinch, ILM's Goodson thinks a ceramic composite would do. That material is popular in industrial construction today because it is strong, light, and heat- and dent-resistant.

Meanwhile, one of Star Trek’s made-up metals has  become a solid fact.

"In Star Trek IV, when they travel back in time, Scotty teaches a 20th-century engineer to make something called transparent aluminum, and he says in response to McCoy's worries about messing with the time line, 'How do we know he didn't invent the stuff?'" Goodson recalls.

About four years ago aerospace firm Raytheon "made it so" by developing ALON, or aluminum oxynitride -- a real-life transparent aluminum. "It's heat-resistant up to 1200 degrees [Fahrenheit] and is being considered by the Air Force as an experimental armor for planes."

In the end, though, film designer Chambliss may have the best notion of what exactly the Enterprise is made of: "Will, strength, and love."

—Victoria Jaggard

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