William Shatner may have steered his ‘Star Trek’ voyages to boldly go where no man has gone before on television, but the acting icon has decided to go a step further in his quest for space exploration.
According to TMZ, Shatner will hop aboard Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket next month for a 15-minute flight into space, making him the oldest man to enter the beyond aged 90. The mission will also be filmed for a space documentary, which we assume will find its way on the Amazon Prime Video platform at a later date.
Shatner, who portrayed Captain James T. Kirk in the popular ‘Star Trek’ franchise, has previously expressed his desire to take a space flight. Last year, the actor shared an image of himself in a spacesuit and tweeted it to US space agency NASA, asking if he could join the SpaceX crew to the International Space Station. What’s Elon Musk’s loss is Bezos’ gain.
Shatner or Blue Origin is yet to officially confirm the news.
Shatner has long been an advocate for space tourism. During a panel discussion entitled ‘Back to the Moon and Beyond With NASA’ at the San Diego Comic-Con, the actor had hinted at the possibility of going on a commercial suborbital spaceflight in the future. “There’s a possibility that I’m going to go up for a brief moment and come back down,” Shatner had said at the time.
The drive for Space Tourism has accelerated over the last year with the 71-year-old Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson flying 53 miles above the Earth as part of the company’s Unity 22 mission earlier this year.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX also successfully sent the world’s first all-civilian crew roughly 360 miles into orbit, the farthest for any human since the Hubble Space Telescope repair missions, for three days.
