It follows the adventures of a present-day, multinational exploration team traveling on the Ancient spaceship Destiny several billion light years distant from the Milky Way Galaxy.

Rush designs a video game used across Earth to find brilliant minds to interpret the puzzle, which Eli Wallace, a young mathematics genius, is able to solve.

Rush and Eli work together to discover the means to dial the ninth chevron, just as the base is attacked by members of the Lucian Alliance.

Rush realizes that the explosion would follow them through the base back to Earth, and instead redials the Stargate with the ninth chevron, successfully opening a wormhole.

Around eighty survivors begin to assure the safety of their team, Senator Armstrong injured and realizing he might not have long, sacrifices himself to seal an air leak in one of Destiny's shuttles.

Rush, Eli, and other scientific members of Icarus Base start to understand the function of Destiny; they are not able to directly control the ship, and find that it will drop out of faster-than-light travel to allow its Stargate to connect to a number of nearby worlds for a fixed period of time before it continues; it fuels itself by diving into the outermost layer of a nearby star and collecting energy from it; the first time the Destiny did that, the crew feared the worst, until they understood why it happened.

[26] Wright and Cooper originally planned to write the pilot script for Stargate Universe during the summer of 2007, making a 2008 premiere possible.

[34] Stargate Atlantis writers Martin Gero and Alan McCullough contributed scripts, but were not part of the regular writing staff.

[13][38] Joseph Mallozzi explained the largely negative initial fan reaction[12][33][34] as a passionate response to the preceding cancellation announcement of Atlantis.

[8] The United States Air Force and Marine Corps reviewed the scripts, and disaster geophysicist Mika McKinnon served as a science consultant.

[12] Stargate Universe had a markedly different shooting style for more reality and immediacy with inspiration from Cloverfield, as if "a documentary crew were to ride along on this adventure to outer space".

[50] MGM revealed its revamped Stargate Universe website on July 8 with an interactive virtual set tour of the Destiny, interviews with the cast, character profiles and videos.

Brad Wright, Robert C. Cooper and most members of the main cast appeared at an SGU panel at San Diego Comic-Con on July 24, 2009.

[14] Stargate Universe is set on the spaceship Destiny, which was launched by the race known as the Ancients from the Milky Way galaxy several million years ago.

The Ancients had planned on using the Stargate aboard Destiny to board that ship when it was far enough out into the universe, but they eventually abandoned the project after looking into ascension and other endeavors.

[27] The series begins when a team of soldiers and scientists from present-day Earth escape through the Stargate and arrive on the Destiny after their base is attacked.

[26] According to Robert C. Cooper, the essence of the story is "that sort of fear and terror of a tragedy combined with the sense that there is hope for us in the basic ways in which human beings survive".

[70] The Boston Globe reviewer Joanna Weiss also reacted positively towards the pilot episodes, saying it felt like "early Lost", while the story arc followed the patterns of Battlestar Galactica.

[71] Mark Wilson from About.com gave the episode four-and-a-half stars out of 5, saying Universe accomplishes what Stargate Atlantis was not able to, and said it was "exceptionally well made" compared to other shows.

[72] The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette both praised the show, calling it "intriguing", for not abandoning its premise as Star Trek: Voyager did and criticized it by pointing out that the characters spend "far too much time wandering a desert planet" in "Air (Part 3)".

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette summarized their review by saying that, "given time, Stargate Universe may become worth watching if it develops its characters and continues to mine its premise for stories.

The reviewer wrote that the "gloomy, underwhelming Universe seems to have ditched many of the elements that the previous "Stargate" shows had, notably camaraderie and a sense of adventure, without adding much in the way of narrative suspense or complexity."

[75] Vince Horiuchi from The Salt Lake Tribune, while not overall positive to the series, said the cast and characters were a "little more likable and interesting" than previous entries in the Stargate franchise.

[87] Robert Carlyle won Best Performance by an Actor in a Continuing Leading Dramatic Role for the first-season episode "Human" at the 2010 Gemini Awards.