William Shatner, who is first Ninety-year-old man who got famous portraying the original Star Trek’s Captain Kirk. He just got hitched to a ride to suborbital spacecraft that grazed outer space’s edge even before the parachute landed, when made him the oldest person ever to travel to space.
“That was unlike anything they described,” Shatner could be heard saying on the flight livestream just before landing.
Shatner blasted off onboard a New Shepard spacecraft which is developed by Blue Origin which is Jeff Bezos’ rocket company, and the same vehicle by which Bezos went to space this summer. Bezos is a forever “Star Trek” fan, flew Shatner as a comped guest. There were three crewmates with him, Chris Boshuizen, who’s the co-founder of satellite company Planet Labs, and software executive Glen de Vries, who’re both paying customers, and Audrey Powers, Blue Origin’s vice president of mission and flight operations.
“What you have given me is the most profound experience, I am so filled with emotion, just extraordinary,” a visibly overcome Shatner told Bezos, immediately after emerging from the capsule. “I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now.”
Their journey did not follow the interplanetary adventures that Shatner commanded during his acting career. From takeoff to landing, New Shepard’s flight lasted only ten minutes and provided passengers with about three minutes of weightlessness.
After a series of wind-related delays, the group strapped into a capsule that sits atop the 60-foot-tall New Shepard rocket Wednesday morning. The rocket roared past the speed of sound at 9:51 a.m. central time, vaulting the capsule past the Karman Line, which, at 62 miles high, is one of the lines used to mark the start of outer space.
During their 2,000-plus mile-per-hour journey, Shatner and his fellow passengers were expected to experience up to 5.5 Gs, which feels like five times their body weight pressing against their chests. A plume of parachutes fanned out above the capsule as it descended, slowing its descent from more than 200 miles per hour to less than 20 in a matter of minutes.
