The mythical Captain Kirk from Star Trek really travels to space at the age of 90

At the age of 90, actor William Shatner, the mythical Captain Kirk in the science fiction series Star Trek, has become the oldest person to travel to space, aboard the New Shepard rocket developed by the Blue Origin company, of the magnate Jeff Bezos.

They were just ten minutes of space flight, but enough to move Shatner, who assured on his return to Earth that he had been “the deepest experience” you have ever imagined.

The actor, dressed in a blue jumpsuit like his fellow travelers, was accompanied on his space journey by three other astronauts, two men and a woman. Specifically, two of them paid to go to space – Chris Boshuizen, co-founder of the nanosatellite company Planet Labs, and Glen de Vries, co-founder of a clinical research platform – while the third was Audrey Powers, vice president of Missions and Blue Origin Flight Operations.

The New Shepard departed from Van Horn in West Texas. Before their departure, the space travelers were transported to the platform, in the middle of a desert area, in two vehicles, one of them driven by Bezos himself. Smiling, the four crew members climbed into the capsule at the top end of the rocket, which was thrown at three times the speed of sound until reaching more than 62 miles of height (about 100 kilometers of height). The rocket thus crossed the imaginary line of Kármán, which in some scientific fields is accepted as the division between the atmosphere and outer space.

Shortly after, the lower part of the rocket returned to Earth, landing on the launch pad, while the capsule remained floating in space for a few minutes before descending aided by several gigantic parachutes. As soon as the capsule touched down, Shatner tweeted a quote from Isaac Newton: “I do not know what it may seem to the world, but for me it has been like a child playing on the seashore having fun now and then finding a softer pebble or a more beautiful shell than normal ones, while the great ocean of the truth spreads undiscovered before my eyes. ”

Bezos awaited them outside the capsule, who greeted the space tourists one by one with a hug as they exited the capsule.

“The deepest experience ever lived”

The second to come out was Shatner, who told Amazon’s founder and until recently CEO that this has been the “most profound” experience he has ever had. “Everyone should do this,” said the Canadian actor., visibly moved. “Seeing the blue whip next to you and now you are looking at the darkness, is what happens.” Through tears she detailed how she had looked down at that blue, with darkness above, and that she had wondered if there is death. “Is death like that? It has been so moving, this experience has been incredible,” said Shatner, who hopes never to recover from what he experienced.

In this way, the interpreter has reached space for the first time in real life, after doing so in fiction aboard the ship ‘Enterprise’ on the ‘Star Trek’ series, which aired its first episode in 1966 and ran for three seasons. Later the artist re-embodied Captain Kirk in six films between 1979 and 1991.

This flight takes place after New Shepard, 60 feet high (about 18.2 meters), was tested 15 times without a crew, before making its first trip with people on board on July 20, in which Bezos himself, his brother Mark and two other people participated. The rocket is named after Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space in 1961 and one of the astronauts to walk on the moon.