 Their small budget was another reason to use the ship for much of the storytelling . When the characters did go off the ship , the worlds all had Earth atmosphere and coloring because they could not afford to design alien worlds . " I didn 't want to go to Yucca Flats every other episode and transform it into Bizarro World by making the sky orange " , recalled Whedon . As Meyer recalled : " I think in the end the feel was that we wound up using a lot of places or exteriors that just felt too Western and we didn 't necessarily want to go that way ; but at some point , it just became the lesser of two evils — what could we actually create in three days ? " 
