It will not go aboard the USS Enterprise but on a more modest spacecraft, the New Shepard, but Captain Kirk will finally fly to the space in real life at 90 years.
We naturally refer to the actor who embodied the protagonist of Star Trek.
Canadian William Shatner, who gave life to James Tiberius Kirk in the original series and in the first movies of mythical spatial saga, will be one of the crew of the next Blue Origin mission, the Aerospace Company of the Billionaire Jeff Bezos, Founder
de Amazon
The takeoff is scheduled for next October 12 from the Texas Space Port.
The actor will also become the older person who flies to space.
The rest of the crew of the NS-18 mission are the Engineer and Attorney Audrey Powers, who worked as a flight controller of NASA and is now Vice President of Blue Origin flight operations;
Chris Boshuizen, former NASA engineer and co-founder of Planet Labs, and Glen de Vries, co-founder of the Medidat company, a medical research platform.
There will be two other travelers who will be announced in the coming days.
“I’ve heard many things about space for a long time, now I’m going to have the opportunity to see it with my own eyes, it’s a miracle,” said Actor William Shatner in a Blue Origin statement.
The actor reached the world fame in the 60s with the STAR Trek series, although throughout his 60 years of career has also been producer, writer and director.
Far from thinking about retirement, he is still active, because he currently produces and presents a series, The UnXplained, on the The History Channel channel.
The brooch at his race will be this space trip, an experience within reach very few people with whom he will fulfill his desire to travel to space.
The sequence of the flight that these six spatial tourists will follow is known as Jeff Bezos made a similar flight on July 20.
They will take off on board a rocket from West Texas, when they exceed 100 km of altitude, they will enjoy a few minutes of weightlessness and the return to Earth will be aboard the space capsule, which will slow down thanks to the parachute, and
That is fully automated, that is, you do not need pilots.
In total, the experience lasts about 10 minutes.
On the July 20 flight, his brother Mark, the Wally Funk pilot, who was invited by the billionaire, and the student Oliver Daemen, who has officially been the first Blue Origin customer.
With 82 years, Wally Funk, who was one of the pilots who tried to be astronauts in the 1960s within the framework of the Mercury 13 program, but prevented them from being a woman, has been the older person since July 20
travel to the space.
If the flight of October 12 is completed, that honor will have William Shatner, eight year older than the vetaran pilot.
Blue Origin competitors have also started or are finalizing their space tourism trips.
The most spectacular and for many, the true space trip so far has been that of Spacex.
The company of Elon Musk has worked for first four civilians around the moon on a mission that lasted three days.
After a couple of one month, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has authorized Virgin Galactic, the Richard Branson Space Tourism Company, to continue the evidence of its subordinary flights after investigating an anomaly detected during the flight of the
July 11, in which Branson himself participated.
The American aviation organism also has Blue Origin at the point of view after the complaint made a few days ago by 21 employees and former employees of the company in which they showed their concern for the alleged relaxation of security during flights.
According to that complaint, the Bezo Company would have ignored the security recommendations to advance more quickly in the space race, something that Blue Origin has denied.
The FAA is investigating it.
