Blue Origin New Shepard Launch: Star Trek Icon William Shatner Becomes World’s Oldest Space Traveler.
“What it has given me is the most profound experience you can imagine,” Shatner told Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.
William Shatner, Star Trek Captain James Kirk, did it for real on Wednesday, becoming the oldest person in space at 90 aboard a rocket flown by billionaire Jeff Bezos Blue company. Origin, an experience that the actor called profound.
Shatner was one of four passengers who traveled 10 minutes and 17 seconds to the edge of space aboard the 60-foot-tall (18.3-meter) fully autonomous white New Shepard spacecraft, which lifted off from the site of Blue Origins launch about 20 miles. (32 km) outside the rural town of Van Horn in West Texas.
Shatner, who embodied the promise of space travel in the classic 1960s television series Star Trek and seven subsequent films, said he had prepared himself to experience weightlessness, but was in awe of the dramatic contrast to the beauty of the blue Earth and the blackness of space.
“You’re looking into the darkness, into the black ugliness,” Shatner said. “And you look down, there’s blue down there – and black up there – and that’s right, there’s Mother Earth.”
“This is life and that’s death, and in an instant, you know, wow, that’s death,” Shatner said. “That is what I saw.”
“Is this what death is like?” Shatner asked.
Before the flight, each astronaut rang a bell and then entered the capsule on top of the rocket, with Bezos closing the hatch. Winds were light and skies were clear for the launch, which took place after two delays totaling approximately 45 minutes.
Shatner was joined by former NASA engineer Chris Boshuizen, clinical research entrepreneur Glen de Vries, and Blue Origin vice president and engineer Audrey Powers.
Transport me
Shatner, who turned 90 in March, has been performing since the 1950s and is still busy with entertainment projects and fan conventions. He is best known for playing Captain James Tiberius Kirk of the spaceship Enterprise on Star Trek.
During the opening credits of each episode of the series, he called space “the final frontier” and promised to “explore strange new worlds, seek new life and new civilizations, boldly go where no man has gone before.”
“Transport me,” Shatner’s character would say to Enterprises chief engineer Scotty, played by James Doohan, in a memorable catchphrase when he needed to be transported to the starship.
Shatner’s involvement helped generate publicity for Blue Origin as it competes against two billionaire-backed rivals, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Bransons Virgin Galactic, to attract customers willing to pay large sums of money to experience spaceflight.
The flight represented another important day for the nascent space tourism industry which, according to UBS, could reach an annual value of $ 3 billion (approximately Rs. 22,590 crore) in a decade.
Blue Origin made a successful space tourism flight debut on July 20, with Bezos and three other people on board for a journey that lasted 10 minutes and 10 seconds. On that flight, pioneer aviator Wally Funk at age 82 became the oldest person to ever reach space.
The previous record was set in 1998 when pioneering astronaut John Glenn returned to space as a 77-year-old US Senator. Branson launched his space tourism service on July 11, traveling on a suborbital flight with six other people.
SpaceX debuted its space tourism business by taking the first fully civilian crew to reach Earth orbit on a three-day mission that ended on September 18.
In his annual address to world leaders last month, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres criticized “billionaires gleefully traveling into space while millions starve on earth.”
When asked about Shatner’s flight, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Wednesday that Guterres “still believes very much what he said in the General Assembly.”
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