As a lifelong Trekkie and card carrying nerd, I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to live in a world where somewhere out there not only is a new Star Trek movie being made, but one that almost everyone I know, not just a handful of fellow nerds on a LARP message board, is interested in. I mean, what’s next? Before you know it I’ll be irresistible to women.

So we all know that Star Trek is getting a sequel, the question is when? Empire caught up with Simon Pegg, who plays Trek’s Scotty 2.0, and he sounds as eager to do it as we are to see it. He says, “I bug J.J. on a regular basis and he just fobs me off.” But other cast members have better information and Pegg says, “I saw Zoe Saldana recently and she reckons that it's going to be soon. I would imagine it'll be toward the end of the year, but I can't guarantee it.”

That could put Star Trek: The Next in theaters for the summer of 2012. And even if they don’t start by the end of the year, it still leaves them plenty of wiggle room to get it done by then. Three years between Star Trek movies feels about right. Any longer and we’d forget, any more and you non-nerds might reach Trek overload.

Update! Trek Movie claims that according to their sources, Star Trek: The Next will only start pre-production this year.