The REAL reason Captain Kirk was a blubbering wreck after conquering the final frontier
When William Shatner returned to Earth after blasting into space on Jeff Bezos’s rocket, the world thought he was crying tears of elation. Now find out...
IREMEMBER my reaction when I was first presented with an opportunity to go to space. I said: ‘No.’ I turned it down not for lack of curiosity, or because I was afraid. Well, I was afraid, but that wasn’t my primary reason. I turned it down because I’m an actor, not an astronaut. Captain Kirk, the role I’d played in the original 1960s Star Trek series and, later, on the big screen, was a spacefaring hero.
But I was a real-life 90-year-old relying on the help of Medicare – the American health system for the elderly and poor.
‘Bill,’ said a friend in TV, ‘they’re going to send civilians up into space. Bezos is going himself and will be looking for others to take with him. Wouldn’t it be great if Captain Kirk went up there?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I replied. ‘I don’t need to go into space. Besides, who on earth would be interested in an actor going up there?’
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the world’s richest men, for starters.
Just a few years back, he invited me to the headquarters of Blue Origin, his space
tourism project, in Seattle, and it was immediately clear he was a major Star Trek fan. I was astonished to see that the centrepiece of the lobby was a replica of the Starship Enterprise. He told me he’d grown up watching Star Trek, and spoke of the power that its portrayal of an optimistic future had had on him as a child. We hit it off immediately.
I learned at that first meeting there was genuine enthusiasm for the idea of sending the world’s most famous space captain into outer space – for real.
And by the end of it, I was excited at the prospect of being on the first civilian trip into space, a journey on a rocket-powered spacecraft that would take me 66 miles above the surface of the Earth, beyond its atmosphere and gravitational pull.
Far enough and high enough for weightlessness. Today, there have been six crewed Blue Origin flights carrying celebrities or those rich enough to spend up to £24million for a ticket. But back then, they were still figuring out when they were going to go on that first flight, so they said they’d get back to us.
Then, in 2020, Covid hit. Everything was delayed. More than a year went by, things changed and it turned out I hadn’t been chosen after all. There would be a second flight in a couple of months’ time. Would I consider that?
I said no. It was like inviting the vice-president to speak after missing out on getting the president. But a few weeks later, I found myself looking up at the evening sky.
It was an unusually clear night, and I could really see the stars, twinkling in their time-warped majesty as their light made its way to me in Los Angeles. I thought about what it might mean to go into space, to slip the bonds of Earth.
The wonder of it overcame me – then the thrill. Being weightless. Looking out into the heavens. Going where no one has gone before. (Well, where some had gone before, I guess…)
I also thought about the dangers. Space disasters flooded my mind. The disastrous explosion of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986; the damaged wing of the Columbia shuttle that led to its break-up on re-entry to the Earth’s atmosphere in 2003. There were other accidents, large and small, most often caused by simple human error.
I thought long and hard about whether I really wanted to do this. Ultimately, I concluded that the sense of thrill outweighed the fear.
And so I found myself back at Blue Origin to complete two days of training in order to comply with Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations.
(By comparison, a typical Nasa astronaut must undergo two years of training before being certified for spaceflight.)
Fortunately, the New Shepard spacecraft that was to carry us to space is fully automated – there is no pilot on board and there are no flight controls. So I wasn’t expected to fly the thing.
As part of the preparation, we were taken up 11 flights of the launch gantry. Then we were escorted to a chamber built out of thick cement with oxygen tanks inside. ‘What’s this room for?’ I asked casually.
‘Oh, you guys will rush in here if the rocket explodes,’ a Blue Origin fellow responded just as casually. Uh-huh. A safe room. Eleven storeys up. In case the rocket explodes.
Well, at least they’ve thought of it.
Our training continued. ‘Should there be a problem with the rocket, the pod is equipped to eject and shoot you to a safe distance, where you will float down in a parachute…’
Should there be a problem with the rocket? That’s like when you’re on a plane and they tell
you that in the event of a water landing, your seat can be used as a flotation device.
With the exception of the Miracle on the Hudson, when a passenger airliner was safely glided on to the Hudson River in 2009, there are few water landings to speak of. Most involve the plane hitting the water at a gazillion miles an hour and exploding on impact. But just in case you land successfully on the water, they’ve got you covered with floating airplane seats.
When the day finally arrived, October 13, 2021, I couldn’t get the doomed Hindenburg airship out of my head. Our take-off was due to be from Launch Site One, a spaceport in the West Texas town of Van Horn, near the Mexican border.
Sensing the nervousness in our group, the ground crew reassured us along the way.
‘Everything’s going to be fine. Don’t worry about anything. It’s all OK.’ Sure, I thought, easy for them to say.
We remounted those 11 flights of stairs to the top of the gantry, breathless at every stop, and got ourselves inside our special pod, lying down in its reclining seats.
Most of the practice sessions we had been through were all about how to get back into those seats for the return journey after you’ve been weightless and floated out of them.
If you aren’t strapped in correctly, there’s a danger you will break your back.
You have to strap yourself in in a specific order: left shoulder, right shoulder, waist, crotch, and by the time you get to the last few straps, you’re lying down and can’t really see where the straps are supposed to go.
I didn’t nail it every time in practice, so as I sat there, waiting to take off, the seat straps were at the forefront of my mind. As was the catastrophic Hindenburg fireball in New Jersey in 1937. Then there was a delay.
‘Sorry, folks, there’s a slight anomaly in the engine. It’ll just be a few moments,’ said a voice.
An anomaly in the engine? That sounds serious, doesn’t it?
More importantly, why would they tell us that? There’s a time for unvarnished honesty, and this wasn’t it. Apparently, the anomaly wasn’t too concerning, because 30 seconds later, we were cleared for launch.
The countdown began. Then with noise, fire and fury, we lifted off and I could see Earth disappearing. As we ascended, I was at once aware of the pressure. Gravitational forces – the Gs – pulling at me.
There was an instrument that told us how much we were experiencing. At two Gs, I tried to raise my arm and could barely do so. At three Gs, I felt my face being pushed right back into my head and the seat behind.
I don’t know how much more of this I can take, I thought. Will I pass out? Will my face melt into a pile of mush? How many Gs can my 90-year-old body handle?
And then, suddenly… relief. No Gs. Zero. Weightlessness. We were floating.
Travelling at 2,233 miles per hour, we had passed the Karman line, the point 62 miles into the air that separates Earth’s atmosphere from outer space. We got out of our harnesses and began to float around. The other folks went straight into somersaults and enjoying all the effects of weightlessness.
But I wanted no part in that. I wanted, needed, to get to the window as quickly as possible, to see what was out there.
I pressed my face against the glass and looked down at where we’d come from.
I could see the hole our spaceship had punched in the thin, blue-tinged layer of oxygen around Earth. And just as soon as I noticed it, it disappeared.
I turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. What I saw was a cold, dark, black emptiness.
It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her. Everything I had expected to see and think and feel had been proven wrong. I
I felt my face being pushed back into my head and the seat behind
I was flooded with grief… the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here
had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis, that connection I had been looking for between all living things – that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe.
In the film Contact, when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper: ‘They should’ve sent a poet.’
I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us.
Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound. And it truly is tiny. The sun is so big in comparison, yet it’s only a moderate-size star. We have seen images from the Hubble Space Telescope that show the true grandeur of our galaxy, and more. But when I finally arrived out there, the splendour was absent.
The feeling wasn’t a warmth or a glow that required poetry to express it; it was ominous. It was the opposite of life.
In space, we know that the temperature can get as cold as minus 270C. You’re either an instant icicle, or – too close to the sun – an instant fireball.
Every precaution we take on Earth is to ensure we are never subjected to such elements.
I was so thoroughly unprepared for this experience, I was
overcome with the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered.
The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.
Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna… things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread.
My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration. Instead, it felt like a funeral.
Then, almost without warning, it was time for the return journey. I struggled back into my seat and we were off.
But by the time we reached around 3Gs once again, I was not conscious of my bones feeling like iron or my face turning to mush. I was consumed with sadness.
The pod landed successfully. We had been gone for a mere ten minutes 17 seconds. One by one, we all made our way out of the capsule and back to terra firma.
And from some wellspring of emotion I hadn’t realised was there, I began to cry uncontrollably, like being told someone you love has died. I was flooded with grief, unable to talk, barely able to function. Others were popping champagne corks, yahooing, slapping each other with high-fives.
Every time champagne spray hit my arm, it was like a hot iron. It was the antithesis of everything I was feeling.
I learned later that I was not alone in this feeling. It is called the Overview Effect, and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others.
When someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet’s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner. It can change the way we look at the planet, but it can also turn your world view on its axis.
In me, it reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement. Bezos came by with a camera crew and interviewed me. I must have sounded nonsensical as I tried to process what I was feeling. I told him: ‘I hope I never recover from this.’
That feeling was something I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
● Boldly Go, by William Shatner with Joshua Brandon, is published by Atria Books on November 10 at £20. To preorder a copy for £18, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937 before November 19. Free UK delivery on orders over £20.