It seemed so inconceivable to him what he had just experienced that as soon as he stepped on the ground he began to laugh. Canadian actor William Shatner, 90, popularly known as Captain Kirk of Star Trek, has traveled to space on Wednesday aboard a rocket of Blue Origin, the subsidiary of Jeff Bezos. The New Shepard spacecraft did not explore new worlds or the galaxy, as Kirk did in the science fiction saga, but 10 minutes and 17 seconds in the air was enough to cause him an epiphany. “What you’ve given me is the most profound experience,” Shatner told Bezos ecstatically after stepping out of the capsule. “I hope I never recover from this. I hope to keep what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it, ”he added.
The actor, who had confessed his nervousness, and that was reflected in his face before embarking on the trip, said when he stepped on the ground again that seeing the sky go from blue to the darkness of space made him wonder: “Is that right? death?”. “What I would love to do is communicate as much as possible the danger, the vulnerability of everything,” he said in unbridled verbiage. The line of the atmosphere “that keeps us alive is thinner than your skin”, he described to Bezos, the second richest man in the world, who opened the hatch of the spaceship wearing his company’s blue astronaut suit.
Jeff Bezos is a fan of science fiction and Star Trek. One of the dreams of the billionaire founder of Amazon was to appear in one of the productions of the space saga. In 2016 it was fulfilled when he made a cameo as an alien Starfleet agent in the film Star Trek Beyond.
Shatner, who traveled for free, became the first nonagenarian to cross the Kármán line, the widely recognized boundary between atmosphere and space 100 kilometers above the ground. The ship’s fully automated capsule soared 106 kilometers over the West Texas desert and the return consisted of a gentle descent at the rate of two parachutes. The flight included about three minutes of weightlessness and a view of the curvature of the Earth. The actor’s feat took from pilot Wally Funk, 82, the position of the oldest person to leave the planet. The aviator, was part of a program of women astronauts in 1961, which was vetoed by the authorities, participated in July in the suborbital flight in which Bezos also traveled for the first time.
On Wednesday’s flight were Blue Origin vice president of mission and operations, Audrey Powers, who is also a pilot (she has spent more than 2,000 hours aboard the International Space Station), engineer and member of the US federation of commercial space flights. Chris Boshuizen, co-founder of Planet Labs, the first company to use nanosatellites commercially, and Glen de Vries, co-founder of Medidata Solutions, one of the world’s leading clinical research platforms.
This morning’s was the sixth manned space mission this year with civilian astronauts who have not received training from the US Government. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic company has launched its space plane to the edge of space twice this year: once in May with a couple of pilots, and once in July with Branson himself, three other passengers and two pilots. . Then it was Blue Origin’s turn with Bezos and three other people, and in September Elon Musk’s SpaceX took a crew of four amateur astronauts into orbit. Earlier this month, Russian actress Yulia Peresild and producer and director Klim Shipenko took off in a Russian rocket to shoot the first movie in orbit on the International Space Station.
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