The ‘Star Trek’ actor and three fellow passengers cruised to an altitude of 107 kilometers above the West Texas desert in a fully automated capsule, then safely parachuted back to Earth.
Hollywood’s Captain Kirk, 90-year-old William Shatner, blasted into space Wednesday at the convergence of science fiction and science reality, reaching the final frontier aboard a ship built by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin company.
The “Star Trek” actor and three fellow passengers cruised to an altitude of 66.5 miles (107 kilometers) over the West Texas desert in a fully automated capsule, then safely parachuted back to Earth. The flight lasted just over 10 minutes.
“What you’ve given me is the most profound experience,” an excited Shatner said to Bezos after exiting the hatch, in a solitude almost as long as the words left by him in flight. “I hope I never recover from this. I hope I can maintain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it.”
He said going from a blue sky into the utter darkness of space was a shaking experience: “In an instant you go, ‘Wow, this is death.’ That’s what I saw.”
In July, Shatner became the oldest person in space — eight years — breaking the previous record set by a similar passenger aboard the Bezos spacecraft. The flight involved approximately three minutes of weightlessness and visualization of the Earth’s curvature.
Sci-fi fans rejoiced at the opportunity to boldly witness the man known as the brave and majestic commander of the Starship Enterprise, where no star of American TV has gone before. The Internet went wild, with Trekkies quoting Kirk’s favorite lines, including “Risk: Risk is our business. That’s what this starship is about.”
“Seeing Captain James Tiberius Kirk going into space is a pinch moment for all of us,” Blue Origin launch commentator Jackie Cortes said before liftoff. She said that she, like many others, came to space from shows like “Star Trek.”
NASA sent well wishes ahead of the flight, tweeting: “You are our friend, and always will be.”
Given its inherent appeal to baby boomers, celebrity watchers and space enthusiasts, the flight brought invaluable star power to Bezos’ space-tourism business. Shatner starred in the TV original “Star Trek” from 1966 to 1969, when America was racing to the moon, and appeared in a series of “Star Trek” movies.
Bezos is a huge “Star Trek” fan—the Amazon founder had a cameo as an alien in one of the later movies—and Shatner frees up as his invited guest.
On Bezos’s side, Shatner took into space some of the “Star Trek” tricorders and communicators—like the iPhones of the future—that Bezos built when he was 9-year-old Trekkie. Bezos said that his mother had saved him for 48 years.
Bezos himself escorted the four crew members to the launch pad, accompanied them to the above-ground platform and closed the hatch after boarding the 60-foot rocket. He was there to welcome them when the capsule swam back to Earth under its brilliant blue and red parachutes.
“Hello, astronauts. Welcome to Earth!” An enthusiastic Bezos said he opened the hatch of the New Shepard capsule, named after Alan Shepard, the first American in space.
Shatner and others wore close-up, flame-retardant, royal-blue flight suits, not exactly the tight, futuristic-for-the-60s V-necks that the Enterprise’s crew had on TV.
The actor said that he was struck by the vulnerability of the Earth and the relative tilt of its atmosphere.
“Everyone in the world needs to see that. Everyone in the world needs to see,” he said. “To see the blue, and now you’re staring into the blackness, that’s the point. This blue cover, this sheath, this blanket, this blue comforter that we have, we say, ‘Oh, that blue sky.’ And then all of a sudden you shoot through all of this, and you’re looking into the blackness, into the black ugliness.”
Shatner said that the return to Earth was more of a shock to his training than he had expected and made him wonder if he was going to make it back alive.
“Everything is much more powerful,” he said. “Bang, this thing hits. That was nothing like a simulator. … Am I going to be able to escape the G-Force?
As the capsule descends, the passengers are subjected to approximately 6 G, or six times the force of Earth’s gravity. Blue Origin said Shatner and the rest of the crew met all medical and physical requirements, including the ability to climb up and down multiple flights of stairs at the launch tower.
“Space-going Shatner is “the worst thing I think I’ve ever seen,” said bartender Joseph Barra, who helped round out the launch week festivities. , setting the bar for it.”
The flight comes as the space tourism industry finally takes off, with passengers rejoicing aboard ships built and operated by some of the world’s wealthiest men.
Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson went to space in July in his own rocket ship, followed by Bezos nine days later with a crew on Blue Origin’s maiden flight. Elon Musk’s SpaceX made its first private trip in mid-September, though without Musk on board.
Last week, the Russians launched an actor and a film director to the International Space Station for a film-making project.
Blue Origin said it is planning another passenger flight this year and several more in 2022. Sounding like the humanitarian and idealistic Captain Kirk, the company said it aimed to “democratize space”.
Shatner worked with Audrey Powers, a Blue Origin vice president and former space station flight controller for NASA, and two paying clients: Chris Boshuizen, a former NASA engineer, and Glenn de Vries of a 3D software company. Blue Origin would not disclose the price of their tickets.
The flight brought the number of humans to space flight to 597.
“Today’s launch is a testament to the power of imagination, and we must not lose that power,” astronomer Adam Frank of the University of Rochester said in an email.
“William Shatner may be ‘just an actor,’ but Captain James T. Kirk represents the collective dream of an optimistic future in space that ‘Star Trek’ and science fiction in general have given us all,” Frank continued. “Bezos gave Shatner a seat on his rocket because he, like millions of others, fell in love with ‘Star Trek’ and its vision of a limitless frontier for humanity.”
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