William Shatner, Star Trek actor, becomes the oldest person to reach space
William Shatner, the Star Trek actor, becomes the oldest person to reach space!
Shatner, 90, who played Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek series, blasted into space on Wednesday on a Blue Origin rocket – the space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
He spent 10 minutes on his suborbital flight alongside three others. then safely parachuted back to Earth in a flight that lasted just over 11 minutes.
“What you have given me is the most profound experience,” an exhilarated Shatner told Bezos after emerging from the capsule.
“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 smashing through the blue sky to the blackness of space was a moving experience: “In an instant you go, whoa, that’s death. That’s what I saw.”
As being reported, a New Shepard rocket took off from the company’s base around 9:49 am (1449 GMT) on Wednesday, after experiencing two brief delays, eventually soaring to 66 miles (106 kilometers) above sea level.
Shatner was joined by Blue Origin executive Audrey Powers, Planet Labs co-founder Chris Boshuizen, an Australian national, and Glen de Vries of clinical research platform Medidata Solutions.
