Star Trek: Prodigy Why is the Protostar always landing?

There is something different that Star Trek: Prodigy fans have noticed about the Protostar

In past series like Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Enterprise never landed…at least not intentionally. Voyager did land, but it wasn’t an everyday occurrence. It seems, however, that the Protostar, the main ship in Star Trek: Prodigy, does land more frequently, so frequently in fact, that one fan (Christian_S @chrise17) pointed out what was bugging him about the series—that the Protostar landed “like all the time.”

Co-executive producer and writer Aaron J. Waltke responded to the tweet, letting Christian know that much like Voyager, the Protostar was designed to land regularly as it was an expierimental exploratory vessel alone in deep space, and that it was a hybrid between a ship and a shuttle.

Star Trek: Prodigy fans chimed in with their approval of the Protostar’s landing

Given that the Protostar is a much smaller vessel than Voyager, with one fan calling it “an advanced runabout,” it made sense to fans that the ship would be landing more often. What also makes sense is the crew is just now getting used to the transporter so they wouldn’t have chosen to utilize that in the beginning. In addition, there wasn’t a dedicated shuttle when Dal and his friends absconded with the Protostar so they didn’t have any other way of leaving the ship other than to land. Though the replicator was capable of creating a shuttle, it wasn’t something that had been fully put to the test.

But overall, it just makes sense, with the crew still learning how to control the ship, that they would be more comfortable landing the Protostar than trying to figure out how to keep it in the air without having issues. They are, essentially, confronting one problem at a time which, when you’re this new, is the right thing to do.