Star Trek’s Capt Kirk becomes world’s oldest space traveller
VAN HORN: Having made a career out of playing an explorer of the cosmos, William Shatner — Captain James Kirk of “Star Trek” fame — did it for real on Wednesday, becoming at age 90 the oldest person in space aboard a rocketship flown by billionaire Jeff Bezos’s company Blue Origin, an experience the actor called profound.
Shatner was one of four passengers to journey for 10 minutes and 17 seconds to the edge of space aboard the white fully autonomous 60-foot-tall (18.3 metres-tall) New Shepard spacecraft, which took off from Blue Origin’s launch site about 20 miles (32 km) outside the rural west Texas town of Van Horn.
The all-civilian crew experienced a few minutes of weightlessness, having travelled about 65.8 miles (106 km) above the Earth’s surface — higher than the internationally recognised boundary of space known as the Karman Line, about 62 miles (100 km) above Earth.
“You’re looking into blackness, into black ugliness,” Shatner said. “And you look down, there’s the blue down there — and the black up there — and it’s just, there is Mother Earth.”“this is life and that’s death, and in an instant, you know — whoa — that’s death,” Shatner said. “That’s what I saw.”
Before the flight, each astronaut rang a bell and then entered the capsule atop the rocketship, with Bezos closing the hatch. Winds were light and skies were clear for the launch, conducted after two delays totalling roughly 45 minutes.
“Beam me up,” Shatner’s character would tell the Enterprise’s chief engineer Scotty, played by James Doohan, in a memorable catchphrase when he needed to be transported to the starship.