NEW ORLEANS—The first time I met the driving force behind the New Starship project, he was wearing a t-shirt with a huge image of Animal from The Muppets on it.

“Hi, I’m Huston Huddleston,” he said, shaking my hand in a hotel lobby before we walked to another room to meet the rest of his posse. (And yes, his name is pronounced like the city in Texas.)

After months of countless phone calls and enthusiastic Facebook messages, I was finally standing before the man who has made it his life’s mission to restore what remains of the bridge of the Enterprise-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG) and turn it into an interactive, nonprofit museum.

His hope is not only to restore the bridge fully, including making all of its computer terminals functional, but to make it available as a free, educational resource for all. Huddleston and his two partners, Brian Uiga and Rusty Harrell, plan on making the bridge available for weddings, moviemaking, and pretty much anything that doesn’t have a commercial goal—particularly to raise money for charities like Habitat for Humanity and the Make-A-Wish Foundation. If all goes well, the restoration project should be completed by the end of 2013.

Huddleston and his team were in New Orleans the first weekend in December to drum up support for their project at the Wizard World Comic Con, where nearly all of the TNG cast were on hand for autographs, photographs, and Q&As. After all, this year (2012) marks 25 years since the show first debuted in 1987.

Now let’s be clear: what Huddleston has is not the original bridge used in the show. That bridge was thoroughly destroyed during the filming of Star Trek: Generations, where the Enterprise crash-lands onto the surface of Veridian III. (But you didn’t need us to tell you that, did you?)

Following the conclusion of the show and the related films, four official replicas were made for Star Trek: The Experience, a theme-park in Las Vegas that was opened in 1998. Construction of each bridge at The Experience was overseen by the show's primary set and graphics designers, Herman Zimmerman and Michael Okuda, respectively.

In addition to the Experience, there was also an official traveling exhibit and immersive "ride" that used the Enterprise-D bridge and other sets built for Star Trek: World Tour in 1998 in Dusseldorf, Vienna, and Singapore. They were further repurposed for Star Trek: The Adventure in London in 2002. When the Adventure concluded in Europe in 2003, nearly all of that bridge eventually came to reside—stored and ignored in legal limbo—in a warehouse facility in Long Beach, California, just south of Los Angeles.

As we reported back in August, Huddleston saved what was left of the Tour bridge just before its pending trip to the junkyard in December 2011. He paid nothing for it—save $7,000 to have it shipped from Long Beach to his home in Sherman Oaks, 40 miles north. As a fan, Huddleston had previously done some collecting of various Trek props, notably paying $500 each for the Riker and Troi chairs from the Experience prior to other items being auctioned off in 2010. (The Experience closed in 2008.)

“I got those, Data’s chair and console, the side walls, and some panels from Vegas. And though I didn’t know I'd have the entire bridge someday, I knew they were an invaluable history of Trek,” he told me by e-mail later on.

In the end, Huddleston rescued the bridge because he couldn’t bear to see it not be saved, even if it meant spending a bunch of his own money and storing it all in his own backyard. He estimated that between the Vegas and Long Beach items, he has spent “at least $20,000” of his own money.

“For [CBS] to not understand the power of the show blows my mind,” he said, almost pained to see the bridge—or the next-best thing to the authentic Enterprise-D bridge—just days away from being junked.

Huddleston tried to figure out what to do with all the pieces, many of which were in awful shape.

“One option was to auction it in pieces,” he explained to me. Obviously there would be great interest in some parts, like the captain’s chair or Worf’s tactical horseshoe, but less interest in the ceiling, for instance.

“Another option [was to sell it] as a whole,” he added. “But I couldn't allow it to bring me down. I spent almost a year trying to convince people to help me. If worst came to worst it could go to a rich guy’s house but then no one would see it.”

Falling through the cracks

After shaking hands, we walked to the breakfast room in the hotel where Huddleston was staying, and he introduced me to a childhood friend, Reed, who had driven down from Memphis to help out. Also seated at the table was Rachel Fore, a 22-year-old volunteer who had come up for the weekend from Texas, and Skyla Grimes, another volunteer who had flown in from Seattle. Dressed in a low-cut top, I admittedly couldn’t stop staring at a tattoo on Grimes' upper left breast, peeking out from her top.

“Is that a communicator tattoo?” I asked, referring to the badges that TNG officers wear on the left side of their uniforms.

“Yes!” the 25-year-old responded proudly.

“Wow, that’s awesome,” I said, admiring its flowing style, which was not an exact replica of a communicator pin.

She explained later that the tattoo was based on an actual size communicator, but when the tattoo artist went to photocopy it, the result was an image that had light bouncing off of it, creating the unique curves and swirls. Grimes and the tattoo artist both agreed that the accidental image was more interesting than a “true-to-life” communicator.

Breakfast, introductions and tattoo inspections finished, the five of us walked the 20 or so minutes down to the New Orleans Convention Center. Having never been to the Big Easy before, I was certainly taken with the French-style wrought iron wrap-around balconies present in much of the city, but it was shocking to see such ugly high-rise hotel towers in the downtown, not to mention the massive Harrah’s Casino near the waterfront.

As we walked and talked, I learned a little more about Huddleston. First, he’s 42 years old, although he looks about 10 years younger.

Second, he comes from a Hollywood family and as a result, is pretty comfortable around celebrities, studio executives, and others in the industry. He’s also a working screenwriter and producer himself.

His father, Floyd Huddleston, who passed away 20 years ago, was a famed Hollywood songwriter who worked for Disney and wrote lyrics and songs for many films, including Midnight Cowboy, The Aristocats, and the 1973 version of Robin Hood, in which Huston’s mother (and Floyd’s wife), Nancy Adams, sang—earning the elder Huddleston an Oscar nomination.

Third, Huddleston took deliberate, careful steps to figure out the best way to preserve Trek history, so as not come across as too much of fanboy (hard to avoid when you're on a mission to “save the bridge”), reaching out to the right people. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, Huddleston felt a compulsion to save this piece of television history in ways that CBS obviously did not. So how was it that this set nearly got trashed?

CBS did not respond to Ars’ request for comment. But the way that Huddleston tells it, a changing of the guard at Paramount and CBS meant that a lot may have fallen through the cracks. In 2005, when the last Trek TV series, Star Trek: Enterprise, wasn’t doing well in the ratings and was cancelled following its fourth season, its parent company was also going through a lot of changes.

Viacom, which previously had been the rightsholder to the Star Trek franchise, split into two parts, one called Viacom and another called CBS Corporation. CBS retained the rights to television (including all the Star Trek shows and related properties), while Paramount Pictures retains the rights to the movies. That meant for Star Trek, that a lot of managers and longtime hands went on to a new corporate parent.

“Once this happened, that's how this bridge got forgotten about—people changed hands, people got fired,” Huddleston said.