"My concept was to do something so large and so epic, it would fire the imaginations of people around the world. After looking at how difficult it would be to bring people to the downtown core (from the Strip), I knew we had to have something really exciting, dynamic, and without equal."

"All of our work, the effort to get Paramount, the Mayor, and redevelopment committee aligned, everything had come to this moment. We were ready to go. Money in place, land provided by the city, license for the property negotiated with Paramount licensing – all set. If Mr. Jaffe says “yes” and we are a “go” project. And the city wanted to have a press conference within a week announcing the project.

In 1992 a Las Vegas downtown redevelopment project was nearly won by the Goddard Group. Their plan was to build a full-scale Star Trek USS Enterprise - complete with restaurant, rides, tours and live entertainment. The aim was to attract fans of the show and tourists to the area to, at the very least, have their picture taken with the iconic Starfleet craft. The hope was that these visitors would then go on to spend money in the hotels and casinos located in the downtown region, which was suffering from the ever popular Las Vegas Strip.Gary Goddard revealed:I think a full size Starship Enterprise would do that!The project was set to cost $150 million, which is actually quite a bargain if you consider the scale of this kind of thing, and the sums of money spent on developing many of the other Vegas attractions. The financing would come from the local hotels and casinos, hence why the proposed Enterprise contained neither.In his quest to make "the world's largest destination attraction", Goddard learnt all there was to know about the Enterprise, and bought several of the world's finest engineers into the project to work out exactly how the spaceship would sit safely in a 'dry dock'. There would have to be some additional supports for the Saucer Section, but otherwise it would've looked just like the Enterprise we all know and love.Of course the project had to be cleared by many people. The then President of Paramount Studios, Sherry Lansing was on board, they also had the approval of the Paramount Licensing Group, and although they were not the only project in contention for the downtown redevelopment project, Goddard was called to a private meeting and told that 'The Starship Enterprise' was the favoured bid by the redevelopment committee and Las Vegas mayor Jan Jones. In fact, they all loved it.There was only one more person who needed to sign off on the project, Paramount CEO Stanley Jaffe. Goddard recalled his meeting with Jaffe: