We now have our first look at William Shatner’s first real trip to space after decades of portraying a legendary “Star Trek” captain, and the view appears to be spectacular.
“Oh, wow!” Shatner says in a video released by Blue Origin, which launched the “Star Trek” actor and three others on a suborbital trip Wednesday (Oct. 13). “No description can equal this.”
While the quarters of Blue Origin’s New Shepard space capsule that Shatner rode to space are not as spacious as those of the fictional U.S.S. Enterprise, a new video from spacecraft provider Blue Origin shows Shatner and his four crew-mates glued to the windows during the flight’s microgravity phase.
“Holy hell!” exclaims Audrey Powers, Blue Origin’s vice president of mission and flight operations, as Shatner chuckles repeatedly while looking at the view of Earth.
During the apogee of the NS-18 mission’s suborbital flight, which lasted just over 10 minutes, the crew members were able to unstrap. The capsule reached a maximum altitude of nearly 66 miles (106 km), which is 4 miles higher than the widely accepted boundary of space.
“This was the voyage of the RSS First Step today,” Blue Origin wrote in a Twitter video description. “Its mission: encounter Earth from incredible views at apogee.”
Glen de Vries, vice chair for life sciences and healthcare at the French software company Dassault Systèmes, and Chris Boshuizen, co-founder of the Earth-observation company Planet, were also on the flight.
But it was Shatner who received the most attention, as the fictional space captain became the oldest person in space at the age of 90, on only Blue Origin’s second-ever crewed spaceflight.
During a press conference following the flight, he was moved to tears as he described his feelings while looking out the window.
“What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine. I’m so filled with emotion about what just happened … it’s extraordinary,” Shatner said, while talking to Blue Origin Jeff Bezos (who embarked on the first crewed flight on July 20).
“I hope I never recover, that I can maintain what I feel now,” Shatner continued. “I don’t want to lose it. It’s so much larger than me and life.
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