In 1987, the sequel series Star Trek: The Next Generation began airing on television in first-run syndication; Roddenberry was involved in the initial development but took a less active role after the first season due to ill health.

[10] He was posted to Bellows Field, Oahu, to join the 394th Bomb Squadron, 5th Bombardment Group, of the Thirteenth Air Force, which flew the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress.

[11] On August 2, 1943, while flying B-17E-BO, 41-2463, "Yankee Doodle", out of Espiritu Santo, the plane Roddenberry was piloting overran the runway by 500 feet (150 m) and crashed into trees, crushing the nose and starting a fire as well as killing two men: bombardier Sgt.

[17] Fourteen (or fifteen)[18] people died in the crash; eleven passengers required hospital treatment (including Bishnu Charan Ghosh), and eight were unharmed.

[20] Roddenberry applied for a position with the Los Angeles Police Department on January 10, 1949,[21] and spent his first sixteen months in the traffic division before being transferred to the newspaper unit.

[28] While working for Ziv, in 1956, he pitched a series to CBS set aboard a cruise ship, Hawaii Passage,[29] but they did not buy it, as he wanted to become a producer and have full creative control.

He wrote another script for Ziv's series Harbourmaster titled "Coastal Security" and signed a contract with the company to develop a show called Junior Executive with Quinn Martin.

[30] He wrote scripts for a number of other series in his early years as a professional writer, including The Jane Wyman Show, Bat Masterson and Jefferson Drum.

[34] Though he did not move, he leveraged the deal to land a contract with Screen Gems that included a guaranteed $100,000, and became a producer for the first time on a summer replacement for The Tennessee Ernie Ford Show titled Wrangler.

[48] The department withdrew its support after Roddenberry pressed ahead with a plot titled "To Set It Right" in which a white and a black man find a common cause in their roles as Marines.

[54] Roddenberry took the Star Trek idea to Oscar Katz, head of programming, and the duo immediately started work on a plan to sell the series to the networks.

Roddenberry and Katz next took the idea to Mort Werner at NBC,[54] this time downplaying the science fiction elements and highlighting the links to Gunsmoke and Wagon Train.

[54] Roddenberry and Barrett had begun an affair by the early days of Star Trek,[55] and he specifically wrote the part of the character Number One in the pilot with her in mind; no other actresses were considered for the role.

[68] Roddenberry corresponded with science fiction writer Isaac Asimov about how to address the issue of Spock's growing popularity and the possibility that his character would overshadow Kirk.

Realizing the show could not survive in that time slot and burned out from arguments with the network, Roddenberry resigned from the day-to-day running of Star Trek, although he continued to be credited as executive producer.

"[84] Herbert Solow and Robert H. Justman observed that Whitfield never regretted his 50–50 deal with Roddenberry, since it gave him "the opportunity to become the first chronicler of television's successful unsuccessful series.

[85] Having stepped aside from the majority of his Star Trek duties, Roddenberry sought instead to create a film based on Asimov's "I, Robot" and also began work on a Tarzan script for National General Pictures.

[89] The last episode of Star Trek aired 47 days before Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon as part of the Apollo 11 mission,[90] and Roddenberry declared that he would never write for television again.

[97] Faced with a mortgage and a $2,000-per-month alimony obligation as a result of his 1969 divorce, he retained a booking agent (with the assistance of his friend Arthur C. Clarke) and began to support himself largely by scheduling appearances at colleges and science fiction conventions.

[100] The conventions began to build the fan support to bring back Star Trek, leading TV Guide to describe it, in 1972, as "the show that won't die.

He created a 45-page writing guide, and proposed several story ideas based on the concept that pockets of civilisation had regressed to past eras or changed altogether.

CBS scrapped Genesis II and replaced it with a television series based on the film; the results were disastrous from a ratings standpoint, and Planet of the Apes was canceled after 14 episodes.

NBC ordered 16 episodes, and tentatively scheduled the series to follow The Rockford Files on Friday nights;[105] the pilot launched on January 23, 1974,[106] to positive critical response, but Roddenberry balked at the substantial changes requested by the network and left the project, leading to its immediate cancellation.

[109] Intended to be about Andrija Puharich's parapsychological research, it evolved into a frank exploration of his experiences attempting to earn a living attending science fiction conventions.

[125] An initial script for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was circulated to eight people; Bennett attributed the subsequent plot leak of the death of Spock to Roddenberry.

[130] According to producer Rick Berman, Roddenberry's involvement in The Next Generation "diminished greatly" after the first season,[131] but the nature of his increasingly peripheral role was not disclosed because of the value of his name to fans.

Although it has been incorrectly attributed to several other authors (most notably Alan Dean Foster), it was the first in a series of hundreds of Star Trek-based novels to be published by the Pocket Books imprint of Simon & Schuster, whose parent company also owned Paramount Pictures Corporation.

Attempts to complete the project by Walter Koenig,[141] Susan Sackett, Fred Bronson,[142] and Michael Jan Friedman have proven to be unfeasible for a variety of legal and structural reasons.

[170] In the late 1980s, it was likely that Roddenberry was afflicted by the first manifestations of cerebrovascular disease and encephalopathy as a result of his longstanding recreational use of legal and illicit drugs, including alcohol, methaqualone,[171] methylphenidate, Dexamyl, and cocaine (which he had used regularly since the production of Star Trek: The Motion Picture).

[189][190] On April 21, 1997,[191] a Celestis spacecraft with 7 grams (1⁄4 oz) of the cremated remains of Roddenberry,[192] along with those of Timothy Leary, Gerard K. O'Neill and 21 other people, was launched into Earth orbit as part of the Minisat 01 mission aboard a Pegasus XL rocket from a location near the Canary Islands.