‘Captain Kirk’ becomes oldest man to visit space
Takes off on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and lands after 10 minutes in space
HWhat you [Bezos] have given me is the most profound experience. I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it.”
William Shatner | Star Trek’s Captain Kirk
ollywood’s Captain Kirk, 90-year-old William Shatner, blasted into space yesetrday in a convergence of science fiction and science reality, reaching the final frontier aboard a ship built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin company.
The Star Trek actor and three fellow passengers hurtled to an altitude of 107km over the West Texas desert in the fully automated capsule, then safely parachuted back to Earth. The flight lasted just over 10 minutes.
“What you have given me is the most profound experience,” an exhilarated Shatner told Bezos after climbing out the hatch, the words spilling from him in a soliloquy almost as long as the flight. “I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it.”
He said that going from the blue sky to the utter blackness of space was a moving experience: “In an instant you go, ‘Whoa, that’s death.’ That’s what I saw.”
Priceless star power
Shatner became the oldest person in space, eclipsing the previous record _ set by a passenger on a similar jaunt on a Bezos spaceship in July _ by eight years. The flight included about three minutes of weightlessness.
The flight brought priceless star power to Bezos’ spacetourism business. Shatner starred in TV’s original Star Trek from 1966 to 1969, when the US was racing for the moon, and went on to appear in a string of Star Trek movies. Bezos is a huge fan — the Amazon founder had a cameo as an alien in one of the later movies — and Shatner rode free as his invited guest.
Bezos himself drove the four crew members to the launch pad, accompanied them to the platform high above the ground and cranked the hatch shut after they climbed aboard the 60-foot rocket. He was there to greet them when the capsule floated back to Earth under its brilliant blueand-red parachutes.
“Hello, astronauts. Welcome to Earth!” a jubilant Bezos said as he opened the hatch of the New Shepard capsule, named for first American in space, Alan Shepard.