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William Shatner: My Trip to Space Filled Me With ‘Overwhelming Sadness’ (EXCLUSIVE)

By William Shatner

William Shatner

William Shatner on Working With Christopher Plummer: ‘I Admired Him Enormously’ 3 years ago

In this exclusive excerpt from William Shatner ‘s new book, “ Boldly Go : Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder,” the “ Star Trek ” actor reflects on his voyage into space on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space shuttle on Oct. 13, 2021. Then 90 years old, Shatner became the oldest living person to travel into space , but as the actor and author details below, he was surprised by his own reaction to the experience.

So, I went to space.

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William Shatner Reflects on “Overwhelming Sadness” from 2021 Space Flight: “It Felt like a Funeral”

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The post William Shatner Reflects on “Overwhelming Sadness” from 2021 Space Flight: “It Felt like a Funeral” appeared first on Consequence .

William Shatner has opened up about his 2021 space flight with Blue Origin in an excerpt from his newly-released book, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder , shared via Variety .

The essay details the preparation for the space shuttle launch on October 13th, 2021, which included Star Trek ’ s original Captain Kirk in a record-breaking endeavor as the oldest person to travel to space at his then-90 years of age, as well as some of the surprisingly grim takeaways from his ascended viewpoint. After admitting to some apprehension that stemmed from engine anomalies, a contingency plan if the rocket exploded pre-flight, and a recurring image of the Hindenburg disaster, Shatner shared his experience with g-force and his impression once the four-person crew reached weightlessness. “Everything I had thought was wrong,” he said. “Everything I had expected to see was wrong.”

“It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered,” Shatner recalled. “The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna… things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread.”

Shatner had expected the trip to provide “the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things.” However, for a mission that was “supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.” His reaction follows the “Overview Effect,” a phenomena common among astronauts like Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, and Sally Ride that features a seismic shift in worldview and human interconnectedness.

The experience has apparently swung Shatner back to the side of optimism though as he shared, “It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement, and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart.” He concluded with a final challenge “to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us. If we seize that chance.”

William Shatner Reflects on “Overwhelming Sadness” from 2021 Space Flight: “It Felt like a Funeral” Bryan Kress

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William Shatner in a rendering of a spaceship with Mars in the background

How William Shatner Was Transformed by the Immensity of Space

When the actor took a suborbital rocket ride, he came down with amazing (and fearsome) insights about the previous nature of our planet

Heading out the door? Read this article on the Outside app available now on iOS devices for members! >","name":"in-content-cta","type":"link"}}'>Download the app .

OUTSIDE: We’re thrilled to speak with you about one of our favorite shared subjects: awe. Let’s start with outer space. When did your fascination with it begin? At a summer camp outside Montreal. I was a city boy, and I was sitting on a log. It was night, and I was looking up into the stars. There was no light pollution! I stared up and fell over backward on the log, fell right on my back. I was so awed by the panoply. I don’t know what it was—more than anything else, the mystery.

Einstein once said that the most beautiful emotion we experience is mystery. I guess he never felt great passion.

Do you remember where you were when you saw the first moon landing ? I know exactly where I was, in a pasture on Long Island. I was getting divorced, as a result of which I had no money. Star Trek had been canceled, and I needed work. I had an old beat-up truck I was living in, doing summer theater. I was a poverty-stricken actor. I was despondent. What am I gonna do now? What am I doing?

I was in my little cot in the camper, looking through a window and seeing the full moon, with a four-inch, black-and-white television set on my chest. I stopped thinking of my own problems and realized: What an extraordinary moment in mankind’s history.

You joined the Blue Origin expedition to space. It sounds like you didn’t expect it to be quite as profound as it was. I mean, you almost turned it down. Not only did I not think it would be profound, but I didn’t think anybody would notice. I was like: Shatner goes up in the air, so what? Nor did I have any idea what an experience it would be for my psyche.

Tell me. I dispensed with the marvel of weightlessness. I just wanted to get to the window and see what there was. So I looked back at where we’d come from and could see the wake of the spaceship in the air, like a submarine going through the water. Then I looked ahead and I saw the blackness of space.

I’m as interested as anybody about the awe and wonder of space . But there was nothing there that was awesome or wondrous. It was black, palpable black, and I saw death. The temperature is death, instant death. Death is all around. There are enormous forces at work that will instantly kill you and our little delicate life-forms.

And then, turning back to earth, I saw that we had gone through this paper-thin atmosphere . And you realize it’s a tiny little rock with two miles of air. And that’s all that’s keeping us alive amid all those forces. So you see how precarious life really is and how you are clinging to this life raft. When we landed, I was weeping. And I’m like, What am I weeping about? Do we not realize how we are offending and destroying this life raft? I was in mourning. I was in grief for the earth.

It sounds like it was truly a surprise, really shocking. Yes. I was shown. It’s one thing to talk about, yeah, the earth’s very small, it’s a pebble. It’s another to see how small it is.

Do you find awe now? I know you take care of dogs and you take care of horses. You live in a beautiful place. I’m filled with awe. I’m filled with awe at the magic of everything. Everything is magical.

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William Shatner boldly went into space for real. Here's what he saw

Joe Hernandez

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket system lifts off from the launchpad carrying 90-year-old Star Trek actor William Shatner and three other civilians near Van Horn, Texas, on Wednesday. Mario Tama/Getty Images hide caption

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket system lifts off from the launchpad carrying 90-year-old Star Trek actor William Shatner and three other civilians near Van Horn, Texas, on Wednesday.

Blue Origin's second human spaceflight has returned to Earth after taking a brief flight to the edge of space Wednesday morning.

Among the four passengers on board — there is no pilot — was William Shatner, the actor who first played the space-traveling Captain Kirk in the Star Trek franchise.

Canadian actor William Shatner, who became a cultural icon for his portrayal of Captain James T. Kirk in the Star Trek franchise, speaks at a convention in 2019. Michele Spatari/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

Canadian actor William Shatner, who became a cultural icon for his portrayal of Captain James T. Kirk in the Star Trek franchise, speaks at a convention in 2019.

"The covering of blue. This sheet, this blanket, this comforter that we have around. We think, 'Oh, that's blue sky,' " an emotional Shatner said after returning to Earth.

"Then suddenly you shoot through it all of the sudden, as though you're whipping a sheet off you when you're asleep, and you're looking into blackness, into black ugliness."

At age 90, Shatner is now the oldest person to fly into space.

"I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, diverting myself in now & then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me," he said in a tweet after landing.

William Shatner dresses as Capt. James T. Kirk at a 1988 photo-op promoting the film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier . Bob Galbraith/AP hide caption

William Shatner dresses as Capt. James T. Kirk at a 1988 photo-op promoting the film Star Trek V: The Final Frontier .

The rocket system, New Shepard, took off around 9:50 a.m. CT from a launch site near Van Horn, Texas.

Joining Shatner on the flight was a Blue Origin employee and two paying customers.

Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns Blue Origin, was on-site for the launch and shook the hands of all four passengers as they boarded New Shepard. The rocket is named after American astronaut Alan Shepard.

William Shatner is bound for space, but the rest of us will have to wait

The entire suborbital journey lasted about 10 minutes. On part of the trip, the four passengers experienced weightlessness.

The capsule topped out at an apogee altitude of 351,000 feet (about 66 miles up). It then fell back to Earth, landing under a canopy of parachutes in the West Texas desert.

Blue Origin launched its first human spaceflight in July , with Bezos and three others on board.

Wednesday's flight came about two weeks after 21 current and former Blue Origin employees wrote an essay accusing top executives at the space company of fostering a toxic workplace that permits sexual harassment and sometimes compromises on safety. Blue Origin denied the allegations.

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My trip to space made me realise we have only one Earth – it must live long and prosper

Star Trek prepared me to feel a connection with the universe. Instead, I felt terrible grief for our planet. At Cop15, our leaders must negotiate to protect it

L ast year, at the age of 90, I had a life-changing experience. I went to space, after decades of playing a science-fiction character who was exploring the universe and building connections with many diverse life forms and cultures. I thought I would experience a similar feeling: a feeling of deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration. A call to indeed boldly go where no one had gone before.

I was absolutely wrong. As I explained in my latest book, what I felt was totally different. I knew that many before me had experienced a greater sense of care while contemplating our planet from above, because they were struck by the apparent fragility of this suspended blue marble. I felt that too. But the strongest feeling, dominating everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced.

While I was looking away from Earth, and turned towards the rest of the universe, I didn’t feel connection; I didn’t feel attraction. What I understood, in the clearest possible way, was that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death. I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

This was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realised that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside. I played my part in popularising the idea that space was the final frontier. But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is, and will remain, our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable.

I was born in Montreal in 1931. During my lifetime, this world has changed faster than for any generation before us. We are now at an ecological tipping point. Without the bold leadership that the times require, we are facing further climate breakdown and ecosystems collapsing before our eyes, with as many as one million species at risk of extinction , according to the latest scientific assessments.

And of all places, it is in the city where I was born that a crucial meeting of the United Nations is being held. At Cop15 , the UN biodiversity summit in Montreal, taking place from 7 to 19 December, world governments will negotiate a global deal to stop the loss of biodiversity by the end of the decade. We need world leaders to give their diplomats a powerful mandate for these talks: agree on strong targets to change the way we produce food, to drastically cut pollution, and to conserve 50% of our planet’s land and ocean , with the active leadership of Indigenous peoples and local communities, who have historically been pioneers on all these necessary actions.

I was the oldest man to go to space . I worry about the world my grandchildren will be living in when they are my age. My generation is leaving them a planet that might pretty soon be barely livable for many of Earth’s inhabitants. My experience in space filled me with sadness, but also with a strong resolve. I don’t want my grandchildren to simply survive. I want them, as an old friend used to say, to be able to live long and prosper.

I will do everything I can so that we can protect our one and only home. Our world leaders have an immense responsibility to do the same in Montreal.

William Shatner is a Canadian actor who played Captain James T Kirk in Star Trek for almost 30 years. He is also author of Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder

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How William Shatner Turned a Flight of Fancy Into a Lyrical Pitch For the Planet

A version of this article also appeared in the It’s Not Just You newsletter. Sign-up here to get a new edition every weekend.

“I was moved to tears by what I saw, and I come back filled with…overwhelmed by sadness and empathy for this beautiful thing we call Earth.”

—Actor William Shatner upon returning safely home from his brief trip into space aboard a Blue Origin rocket on October 13th.

When William Shatner, the man who played the legendary Captain James T. Kirk on “ Star Trek, ” clambered out of a rocket capsule and into the west Texas desert, he was embraced by Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin’s founder and one of the richest men on this planet.

Getting Captain Kirk to fly Blue Origin was quite a P.R. coup for Bezos’ private spaceflight company in what has become a space tourism race amongst billionaires. But perhaps not in the way that Bezos might have imagined.

From the moment he stepped off the landing pad, and on every news show after that, Shatner spoke poetically and with Kirkian emotion about his ten-minute trip to the edge of space and how he saw death out there in the endless dark. He said seeing the Earth at that distance evoked a deep sense of mortality—not just his own as a 90-year-old man, but in the threat to Earth as we continue to pollute the thin blue atmosphere that makes life possible down here.

Leaning into Bezos , with tears in his eyes, Shatner described those layers of atmosphere as “this comforter of blue that we have around us.” And he went on to talk about what it felt like blasting through the 50 miles of that Earthly blanket at 2,500 miles an hour:

“Oh, that’s blue sky. And then suddenly you shoot through it, all of a sudden like you whip off a sheet when you’ve been asleep, and you’re looking into blackness. Into black ugliness.”

As he spoke, the other astronauts (or “customers” as Blue Origin’s Livestream hosts called the flight’s two paying passengers) and a Blue Origin executive who was also on the flight cheered and jumped and sprayed champagne on each other. Shatner went on, gesturing downward: “There is mother and Earth and comfort. And then, looking up, he said: “Is—is there death? Is that death? Is that the way death is?”

Bezos, also in a bright blue flight suit, pinned insignias on his four astronauts looking like the head of a small country. In a way, he is a kind of nation-state as the founder of the ubiquitous Amazon which dominates online commerce and cloud computing, and a man whose personal fortune is somewhere between $189 billion and $200 billion which is more than NASA’s entire budget. Bezos has pledged to give $1 billion per year toward environmental conservation over the next ten years. His critics suggest that’s too small a figure given Amazon’s carbon footprint (in addition to Blue Origin’s rockets) and estimates that Bezos made about $70 billion last year alone.

But on this day, there was little debate over those larger questions as Shatner accepted the insignia and thanked Bezos for the gift of a profound experience that he didn’t want to ever recover from, adding that everyone should be able to see Earth the way he had.

And from there, Captain Kirk was on every network show his plea for the planet and the health of our grandchildren becoming more forceful with each iteration.

It was glorious to watch T.V. hosts try to steer Shatner away from talk of death and toward the fun of being up there after playing a spaceship captain for decades. Shatner gamely made jokes about being 90 but then he would inevitably bring them back to his more significant point, that we can’t keep “burying our heads in the sand” about global warming. He told CNN’s Chris Cuomo: “I wish could bring a message of lightness to leaven the terrible news you keep announcing,” but “we’re at a tipping point.”

Despite the mission statement on Blue Origin’s site, which talks about bringing millions of people to live and work in space, Shatner went on to tell Cuomo: “Space is cold and ominous and ugly, and it really threatens death, there’s death there. And you look down, and there’s this warm, nurturing planet.”

I spoke to Shatner a few years ago on the 50th anniversary of the original “Star Trek.” He talked about the climate crisis fervently then too. He’d read Rachel Carson’s environmental classic “Silent Spring,” 40 years ago and lamented that we didn’t take the threat to humanity more seriously then.

“We’re here because of technology. And it seems the only way out of it is technology,” he said suggesting that we use science to develop a way to get carbon dioxide out of the air, and dismissing ideas of moving humanity to another planet as a “fantasy.” Shatner believes that in our bickering about a billion here or there, we’re wasting time. “We seem to be vainly beating out fists against the windowpane of extinction.”

In many ways, the former Captain Kirk doesn’t sound so different from Carl Sagan , the famed American astronomer, who also dismissed the idea that there’s a backup home for us:

“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

When TIME’s Jeffrey Kluger asked Shatner this week whether he’d want to cross that line between Earth and outer space again, he said he wasn’t sure, noting that at 90, who knows how much time he has to be here in the beauty of this planet. “I’m calling you from my beautiful home, overlooking the San Fernando Valley,” he said. “The sun comes up. I’ve had a lovely egg sandwich my wife made, my two dogs love me, and I’m sitting in a comfortable chair, and I’ve just come from this thrilling thing of life.”

I asked Shatner about Star Trek’s legacy and why it still inspires people today even though it was, in his words, a fantasy. “Star Trek proposes that technology four hundred years from now will have solved all these problems,” he said. “And that is one of the appeals of Star Trek–that it says the future exists, that we will exist.”

Write to me at: [email protected] , or via Instagram: @SusannaSchrobs. And, sign up here to get a new edition of It’s Not Just You every weekend.

EVIDENCE OF HUMAN KINDNESS ❤️

Here’s your reminder that creating a community of generosity elevates us all.

Arizona single mother of an 8-year-old boy, Karina, is a survivor of domestic violence and has been doing her best to stay afloat. Karina is a small business owner was hit really hard during the pandemic but as she says “she has managed to get by every month to meet my basic needs.”

Just when she thought things couldn’t get any harder, her son began to feel weak and was diagnosed with a rare genetic blood disorder. Not being able to work while spending weeks at a time at the local Children’s Hospital, she began to fall behind on her rent and was also at risk of losing the office space for her business.

Karina heard about Pandemic of Love on comedian Chelsea Handler’s Instagram page and decided to reach out to the organization in a last-ditch effort to catch up.

The organization’s Arizona chapter leader connected her to a recurring donor named Joannie. Joannie was so touched by Karina’s story and connected with her on the phone saying that “Karina reminded me so much to my younger sister who passed a few years back – hardworking, determined and filled with unconditional love for her son.”

Joannie could only help Karina with one month’s rent but wanted to do more. She formed a “giving circle” with her friends at her local church and book club and with 20 women chipping in for $100 each, they were able to present Karina with enough money to provide her relief for two additional months.

Karina wrote to Pandemic of Love in disbelief:

“I’ve been operating from a belief that I am alone, and now I understand that I am not. I’m surrounded by strong women in my community. And I’m so grateful.”

Story courtesy of Shelly Tygielski, author of “ Sit Down to Rise Up ” and founder of Pandemic of Love , a grassroots organization that matches volunteers, donors, and those in need.

COMFORT CREATURES 🐕

Meet Annie, submitted by Linda who writes: “She is a shy, 70-pound red lab. She is shy and a homebody …. perfect for a pandemic. To her, we owe our sanity, our reason to walk every day, and the ability to see life through her eyes. She knew of course nothing about the pandemic but I think she realized we were home 24/7 with her and boy was she spoiled!”

Write to me at: [email protected] , or via Instagram: @SusannaSchrobs. And, sign up here to get an essay every weekend.

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William Shatner Reacts to a Real Space Trip as Only He Can

By Neima Jahromi

When William Shatner returned to Earth, on Wednesday morning, from a four-minute sojourn into space aboard a Blue Origin rocket, he appeared genuinely and profoundly moved. Shatner touched down in the West Texas desert with the crew’s other three members, Audrey Powers, a former space-station flight controller who is now a Blue Origin vice-president, and two paying passengers: Chris Boshuizen, a former NASA space-mission architect and the co-founder of Planet Labs, and Glen de Vries, a software entrepreneur. Jeff Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s C.E.O. three months ago to focus on Blue Origin, his private aerospace company, and who was on the company’s first human flight , in July, was there to welcome them back. He twisted a latch and opened the capsule, and the crew, including Shatner—who, at ninety, had become the oldest person to travel above the Kármán line, the boundary to outer space—stepped out. The two men embraced.

Shatner almost immediately began to explain the feeling of escaping the Earth’s atmosphere, but waited patiently while Bezos stopped him to grab a bottle of champagne, which he sprayed on the other crew members as well as the assembled guests. “Everybody in the world needs to see it,” Shatner continued. “This comforter of blue that we have around us. We think, Oh, that’s blue sky. And then suddenly you shoot through it, all of a sudden, like you whip off a sheet when you’ve been asleep, and you’re looking into blackness. Into black ugliness.” He began to gesture down and then up, speaking in the trademark cadences that are so fondly familiar to fans of his appearances as Captain James T. Kirk, the commander of the Starship Enterprise, on “Star Trek.” “There is mother and Earth and comfort, and, there . . .” He gestured into the air, squinting toward the sun. “Is—is there death? Is that death? Is that the way death is?” Bezos, a longtime Trekkie who had a cameo role as an extraterrestrial in the 2016 film “Star Trek Beyond,” nodded. “I mean, whatever those other guys are doing,” Shatner added, likely referring to Bezos’s billionaire competitors at SpaceX (Elon Musk) and Virgin Galactic (Richard Branson). “What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine.” His voice cracked, and Bezos hugged him again. “I hope I never recover from this,” Shatner said.

A moment later, he added, frankly, “This is now the commercial—it would be so important for everybody to have that experience.” His ride on Blue Origin’s second human space launch, a year and a half in the making, is clearly part of a plan to engage public interest in private ventures beyond our atmosphere, and he seemed aware of his role in that project. Blue Origin has said that its ultimate goal, rather than shuttling wealthy people into space, is to advance technologies to more easily get the carbon-dioxide emissions that fuel climate change into space. It’s an effort that Bezos has said will “take decades to achieve,” adding, “big things start with small steps.” (He has also committed to spend ten billion dollars in the next ten years to fight climate change through the Bezos Earth Fund.) Other, more plausible plans for addressing the climate crisis are closer at hand—some, for example, are included in the Biden Administration’s infrastructure bills. Still, Shatner gamely made the rounds of cable-news chat shows ahead of his flight. “He’s got this great vision of what he wants to do, to put industry up in space and let the pollution dissipate up there,” he told Anderson Cooper, speaking of Bezos. “It’s a great idea. It can’t be done too soon, by the way.”

Shatner has had a long life in the public relations of space. There was an obvious symbiotic relationship between “Star Trek” and the real-life space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1957, the Russians put a dog (Laika) into orbit. In April, 1961, they put a man (Yuri Gagarin) into space; a month later, the United States did, too (Alan Shepard), and President Kennedy announced that NASA would get Americans to the moon by the end of the decade. Four years later, both countries set astronauts adrift in space, outside their capsules, and television networks green-lit sci-fi space shows. In 1965, CBS picked up “Lost in Space.” In September, 1966, NBC responded with “Star Trek.” “A NASA executive discovered that every time they launched a manned rocket our ratings went up, meaning people were very interested in space,” Shatner writes in his autobiography “Up Till Now,” published in 2008. “And when our ratings went up Congress voted more money for the space program.” NASA officials invited Shatner to sit in a lunar space capsule and to experience a simulated flight, he said. As a surprise, they created a model of the Enterprise and set it on a flight path outside the capsule window.

In 1969, “Star Trek,” then in its third season, lost its coveted Monday-night time slot to “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.” Its ratings suffered, and NBC cancelled the series. The final episode aired in June, just a month before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the lunar surface. Our nonfictional galactic adventures were soon struggling, too. The enormous budget of the space program had already faced opposition from legislators and activists who wanted to prioritize domestic priorities, such as the war on poverty. In the seventies, with the Soviets beaten in the race to the moon, and Richard Nixon, a fiscal conservative, in charge, public appetite for costly space exploration diminished, and government spending began to flow away from the Apollo program.

In 1978, Shatner, in the middle of starting the “Star Trek” film franchise, criticized what he saw as NASA ’s public-relations failures. “We need a goal and a dream. The Russians are very prosaic. Their space program is very mechanical and militaristic. Ours has magic to it,” he told the Indianapolis News . “But if the public isn’t acquainted with what’s going on in the space program, it’s going to tell Congress to spend the money on something else.” In 1984, Ronald Reagan, hoping to reconjure some of that magic, announced that NASA would send a member of the public, a teacher, into space. Tragically, two years later, as school students watched from their classrooms, Challenger, the shuttle meant to take Christa McAuliffe, a thirty-seven-year-old social-studies teacher from New Hampshire, into orbit, blew up a minute and thirteen seconds after launch, killing the entire crew. Shatner was watching, too. “The O-ring was frozen,” he told an audience at New York’s Comic Con, a few days before his Blue Origin spaceflight. “The O-ring didn’t work. And the rocket exploded.”

Shatner noted that Blue Origin engineers frequently referred to their calculations for the launch as a “best guess.” “I’m going up in a rocket, and our best guess is it should be fine,” he told the Comic Con audience. “I’m terrified,” he admitted, as he sat and gripped his heart. “I’m Captain Kirk, and I’m terrified.” He stood up. “I’m not really terrified,” he said, laughing. “Yes, I am. It comes and goes like a summer cold.” Happily, this time, the best guess was good enough. (In September, Alexandra Abrams, who was dismissed two years ago as the head of Blue Origin’s employee communications, published an essay detailing a toxic work environment at the company, a description that she said was endorsed by twenty other former and current Blue Origin staff members. The essay also claims that executives pushed workers in a way that threatened to sacrifice safety for speed. Blue Origin responded by saying that it maintains and monitors a 24/7 anonymous hotline for misconduct allegations, and that the company stands by its safety record.)

“Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,” a movie with an environmental theme—as it happens, directed by Leonard Nimoy, and one the most successful in the Shatner-led “Star Trek” film series—opened in theatres in November, 1986, a few months after the shuttle disaster. (In a moment of infelicity, the film, which was dedicated to the Challenger crew, begins with an interplanetary council watching the explosion of the Starship Enterprise.) It is the twenty-third century, and Earth is on the verge of ecological collapse, owing to the effects of a mysterious spacecraft hovering above the atmosphere; it is transmitting humpback-whale songs into the oceans and will not leave until there’s a reply, but humpbacks are now extinct. Captain Kirk, aboard a “borrowed” spaceship, sells his crew on a radical idea: the only way to save the planet is to plunge at warp speed into the orbit of the sun and sling their ship into a past where the cetaceans still exist—the San Francisco Bay Area of the nineteen-eighties. Kirk finds some whales, but bringing them back to the future proves difficult. Spock, the sage half-Vulcan second-in-command, is trying to work out the physics of the crew’s solar slingshot home. The ship’s doctor, Leonard McCoy, urges Spock to make his “best guess.” Spock replies, “Guessing is not in my nature, doctor.”

In a way, Shatner as Kirk and his crew of brash explorers are a perfect avatar for Bezos and his fellow-billionaires, though riding into space to save the planet from environmental apocalypse is more likely to work in fiction than in life. Shatner’s own commitments, meanwhile, remain firmly terrestrial. Mars, he said, fresh from his foray into space, is not going to cut it. “What I would love to do is to communicate, as much as possible, the jeopardy,” he told Bezos, as they stood in the desert. “The vulnerability of everything—it’s so small. This air which is keeping us alive is thinner than your skin.”

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the extent of Shatner’s and Shepard’s spaceflights.

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William Shatner boldly went into space for real. Here's what he saw

Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket system lifts off from the launchpad carrying 90-year-old Star Trek actor William Shatner and three other civilians near Van Horn, Texas, on Wednesday.

Updated October 13, 2021 at 11:08 AM ET

Blue Origin's second human spaceflight has returned to Earth after taking a brief flight to the edge of space Wednesday morning.

Among the four passengers on board — there is no pilot — was William Shatner, the actor who first played the space-traveling Captain Kirk in the Star Trek franchise.

"The covering of blue. This sheet, this blanket, this comforter that we have around. We think, 'Oh, that's blue sky,' " an emotional Shatner said after returning to Earth.

"Then suddenly you shoot through it all of the sudden, as though you're whipping a sheet off you when you're asleep, and you're looking into blackness, into black ugliness."

At age 90, Shatner is now the oldest person to fly into space.

William Shatner dresses as Capt. James T. Kirk at a 1988 photo-op promoting the film <em>Star Trek V: The Final Frontier</em>.

The rocket system, New Shepard, took off around 9:50 a.m. CT from a launch site near Van Horn, Texas.

Joining Shatner on the flight was a Blue Origin employee and two paying customers.

The entire suborbital journey lasted about 10 minutes. On part of the trip, the four passengers experienced weightlessness.

The capsule topped out at an apogee altitude of 351,000 feet (about 66 miles up). It then fell back to Earth, landing under a canopy of parachutes in the West Texas desert.

Blue Origin launched its first human spaceflight in July , with Bezos and three others on board.

Consequence

William Shatner Reflects on “Overwhelming Sadness” from 2021 Space Flight: “It Felt like a Funeral”

Shatner shared his experience with the "Overview Effect" and more in an excerpt from his new book

William Shatner has opened up about his 2021 space flight with Blue Origin in an excerpt from his newly-released book, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder , shared via Variety .

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William shatner reflects on "overwhelming sadness" from 2021 space flight: "it felt like a funeral".

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William Shatner explains why his trip to space ‘felt like a funeral’: ‘I saw death and I saw life’

The 'star trek' alum became the oldest person to ever leave earth when he traveled to space aboard jeff bezos' blue origin new shepard vehicle at age 90.

'Star Trek' alum William Shatner, author of 'Boldly Go,' detailed to Fox News Digital his emotional experience traveling to the great beyond.

William Shatner made history when he became the oldest person to travel to space – but the experience left him in tears.

In October 2021, the "Star Trek" alum embarked on the adventure of a lifetime with the help of Jeff Bezos’ aerospace company Blue Origin. The Amazon empire founder credited the actor with igniting his interest in space travel.

The 91-year-old was one of four crew members aboard the New Shepard rocket for the NS-18 mission. It took off from Launch Site One in West Texas. The Emmy winner recalled his experience in a new book titled "Boldly Go: Reflections on a life of Awe and Wonder." In it, Shatner wrote that his trip to space "was supposed to be a celebration." Instead, it "felt like a funeral."

‘Star Trek’ actor William Shatner (R) gestures as Planet Labs co-founder Chris Boshuizen looks on during a media availability on the landing pad of Blue Origin’s New Shepard after they flew into space on October 13, 2021, near Van Horn, Texas. Shatner became the oldest person to fly into space on the 10-minute flight. They flew aboard mission NS-18, the second human spaceflight for the company which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

"When I landed and came out of the spaceship, I was overwhelmed by a feeling and I started to weep," Shatner recalled to Fox News Digital. "I didn’t know what I was crying about. And it took me a couple of hours to be by myself to figure out what’s the matter with me. And then I realized I was in grief for this beautiful world that I could see more clearly from up in space… This planet that took 5 billion years to evolve into what it is now. And all the multitude of things that we human beings can love and be aware of that are so beautiful. Never mind the elephants and the great predators and all that stuff… but the stuff today. The child, your fingers. I mean, everything abounds that is a miracle and is beautiful – and we’re destroying it."

WILLIAM SHATNER SHARES PROFOUND WORDS AFTER SUCCESSFUL BLUE ORIGIN FLIGHT: 'I HOPE I NEVER RECOVER FROM THIS'

"That was my overwhelming feeling of, ‘Oh my God, what are we doing to this tiny rock?'" the actor added.

The star, who is in his twilight years, has been in deep reflection about Earth and what it holds for the future. Shatner noted that his aerial adventure gave him a deeper appreciation for life and all its blessings. It also made him concerned about how the planet and its gifts are being taken for granted.

Jeff Bezos talks to William Shatner after Blue Origin's New Shepard crew capsule landed back in Texas. The actor said he wept after traveling to space. (Photo by Blue Origin/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

"… It’s black – it’s palpable black," Shatner described his view from the great beyond. "And when I was looking at where we were coming from and saw the beige and the blue and the white of this extraordinary place we live in, I saw death and I saw life."

Shatner has led a decades-long career with hit shows, such as "The Defenders," "T.J. Hooker" and "Boston Legal," along with the original "Star Trek" series and films. However, these days, Shatner is not thinking about Hollywood. He said that reflecting on his life and the many lessons he learned along the way helped him come to terms with death.

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"Well you know, you can write about it all you want, and you could talk about it," he explained. "And you can get advice from people who don’t know any more about death than you do because nobody knows anything. And it still doesn’t matter if you have a belief system, which I envy… I see the vibrating connection of the universe of which we are a part of. And it would seem likely to me… we are made of stardust, and we return to stardust.

The New Shepard rocket launched on Oct. 13, 2021, from the West Texas region, 25 miles north of Van Horn. (Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)

"But the question that we will always ask is, what happens to this thing? We are talking about death and anticipating death. And I don’t know of any other animal that might do that. Elephants mourn. They take the bones of [other] dead elephants. They know something. They know that there’s a concept of death there, I think. But I don’t think they ask, ‘Where does the soul go? Where does that life energy go?’… Of course, nobody knows."

"So the question is, where does the life force go?" Shatner shared. "Some people call it a soul, some people call it whatever. Where does that energy go? And maybe that’s what we’re talking about in terms of life after death."

Shatner noted that as he reflected on death, his appreciation for life has only grown, and each day is a chance for him to continue pursuing his passions.

WILLIAM SHATNER FIRES BACK AT PRINCE WILLIAM FOR DISSING SPACE RACE

(L-R) Blue Origins Vice President of Mission & Flight Operations Audrey Powers, "Star Trek" actor William Shatner, Planet Labs co-founder Chris Boshuizen and Medidata Solutions Co-Founder Glen de Vries. The group is seen arriving to attend a press conference at the New Shepard rocket landing pad on Oct. 13, 2021, in the West Texas region, 25 miles north of Van Horn. (PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images)

And the questions continue to persist.

"It's impossible for [this] to be the only world," Shatner explained. "There are other intelligent entities out there, probably since life is so ardent. There's such passion in life that… it’s everywhere… And everything in life has a passion to live. So, you think that's only on this little rocky planet?"

"… I've been playing with this idea of how connected we all are to the universe and, even more specifically, how deeply the connections to our world that we are," he added.

Actor William Shatner said he has been thinking about life - and death. (Kris Connor/Getty Images)

In his book , Shatner wrote that despite his overwhelming feelings of grief, his experience traveling to space gave him "hope to my heart."

WILLIAM SHATNER SHARES TOUCHING LEONARD NIMOY MEMORY, EXPLAINS WHY HE'S TAKING ON 'THE UNXPLAINED'

"In this insignificance we share, we have one gift that other species perhaps do not: we are aware — not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant," he wrote. "That allows us perhaps a chance to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us. If we seize that chance."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Stephanie Nolasco covers entertainment at Foxnews.com.

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William Shatner boldly went into space for real. Here's what he saw

Blue Origin's New Shepard lifts off from the launch pad carrying 90-year-old Star Trek actor William Shatner and three other civilians near Van Horn, Texas.

Updated October 13, 2021 at 11:08 AM ET

Blue Origin's second human spaceflight has returned to Earth after taking a brief flight to the edge of space Wednesday morning.

Among the four passengers on board — there is no pilot — was William Shatner, the actor who first played the space-traveling Captain Kirk in the Star Trek franchise.

"The covering of blue. This sheet, this blanket, this comforter that we have around. We think, 'Oh, that's blue sky,' " an emotional Shatner said after returning to Earth.

"Then suddenly you shoot through it all of the sudden, as though you're whipping a sheet off you when you're asleep, and you're looking into blackness, into black ugliness."

At age 90, Shatner is now the oldest person to fly into space.

This 1988 file photo shows William Shatner dressed as Capt. James T. Kirk at a photo opportunity promoting the Paramount Studios film "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier."

The rocket system, New Shepard, took off around 9:50 a.m. CT from a launch site near Van Horn, Texas.

Joining Shatner on the flight was a Blue Origin employee and two paying customers.

The entire suborbital journey lasted about 10 minutes. On part of the trip, the four passengers experienced weightlessness.

The capsule topped out at an apogee altitude of 351,000 feet (about 66 miles up). It then fell back to Earth, landing under a canopy of parachutes in the West Texas desert.

Blue Origin launched its first human spaceflight in July , with Bezos and three others on board.

Undated photos of some of our favorite San Diego-area video entries to the 2024 NPR Tiny Desk Contest are shown.

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William Shatner says he got emotional about ‘fragility of this planet’ during trip to space

William Shatner has been beamed up. Now, he’s just beaming.

The actor, 90, became the oldest person to fly to space Wednesday when he flew aboard a rocket developed by Blue Origin, the private spaceflight company founded by former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and he joined TODAY live on Thursday to describe the experience and why it made him so aware of “the fragility of this planet.”

“I was trying to think of something clever to say and then we get up and when I was there, everything I thought might be clever to say went out the window,” he told Savannah Guthrie and Hoda Kotb. “All of a sudden the blue is down below and the blackness of space — and space is interesting, the universe lies there — but in that moment, in that window, it was only black and ominous.

“I was overwhelmed with the experience, with the sensation of looking at death and looking at life and what’s become a cliché of how we need to take care of the planet,” he added. “I was struck so profoundly by it.”

The trip aboard the New Shepard rocket had been bumped back one day due to high winds in West Texas, where the flight originated, and then for another hour on Wednesday before going off without a hitch, with the rocket launching at more than 2,000 miles per hour.

“No description can equal this,” the “Star Trek” legend can be heard saying in video from inside the rocket.

Shatner boldly went where only a few people have gone before. He was joined on his flight by Audrey Powers, Blue Origin’s vice president of mission and flight operations, as well as two paying customers, Glen de Vries and Chris Boshuizen, who reportedly paid $250,000 apiece to take part in the adventure. The trip lasted about 10 minutes after lifting off around 10:50 a.m. ET.

“What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine,” Shatner told Bezos through tears after returning to Earth. “I am overwhelmed. I had no idea.”

This is the second time Blue Origin has sent people into space. In July, Wally Funk, 82, one of several pioneering women who trained to become astronauts in the ’60s before their program was canceled, rode the first flight along with Bezos.

Last month, SpaceX, the spaceflight company founded by Elon Musk, sent four private citizens into orbit around Earth on a three-day trip, becoming the first orbital launch with an all-civilian crew .

While many people are cheering on these missions by billionaires, others such as Prince William say the effort to send humans into space takes away from the threat of climate change.

“We need some of the world’s greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live,” he said Wednesday on the BBC.

Blue Origin will be back at it with another flight scheduled in a few weeks, while a Japanese fashion mogul is expected to fly to the International Space Station. A Russian actor also recently filmed a movie there.

SpaceX will also carry three private passengers next February for another ride with a price tag of $55 million each. Virgin Galactic will also carry three people for a flight for research.

Drew Weisholtz is a reporter for TODAY Digital, focusing on pop culture, nostalgia and trending stories. He has seen every episode of “Saved by the Bell” at least 50 times, longs to perfect the crane kick from “The Karate Kid” and performs stand-up comedy, while also cheering on the New York Yankees and New York Giants. A graduate of Rutgers University, he is the married father of two kids who believe he is ridiculous.

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Star Trek's William Shatner blasts into space on Blue Origin rocket

Published 13 October 2021

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After landing, William Shatner tearfully said the experience had been "unbelievable"

Hollywood actor William Shatner has become the oldest person to go to space as he blasted off aboard the Blue Origin sub-orbital capsule.

The 90-year-old, who played Captain James T Kirk in the Star Trek films and TV series, took off from the Texas desert with three other individuals.

Mr Shatner's trip on the rocket system - developed by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos - lasted about 10 minutes.

The craft safely landed just after 10:00 local time (16:00 BST).

Those aboard got to experience a short period of weightlessness as they climbed to a maximum altitude just above 100km (60 miles). From there they were able to see the curvature of the Earth through the capsule's big windows.

"Everybody in the world needs to do this," the Canadian actor told Mr Bezos after landing back on Earth. "It was unbelievable."

In tears, he added: "What you have given me is the most profound experience. I'm so filled with emotion about what just happened. I hope I never recover from this. I hope I can retain what I feel now. I don't want to lose it."

Safety concerns raised at Bezos space company

82-year-old becomes oldest-ever person in space

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Mr Shatner was joined on the flight by Audrey Powers, a Blue Origin vice president; Chris Boshuizen, who co-founded the Earth-imaging satellite company Planet; and Glen de Vries, an executive with the French healthcare software corporation Dassault Systèmes.

They were given a couple of days' training, although there was nothing really major for them to do during the flight other than enjoy it. The rocket and capsule system, known as New Shepard, is fully automatic.

When the capsule touched down in the Texan desert, it was quickly surrounded by ground teams. Mr Bezos himself opened the hatch to check everyone inside was OK.

After the immediate celebrations with family and friends, the crew then lined up to receive their Blue Origin astronaut pins.

William Shatner: "I hope I never recover from this"

This was only the second crewed outing for New Shepard. The first, on 20 July, carried Mr Bezos, his brother Mark, Dutch teenager Oliver Daemen; and famed aviator Wally Funk.

Afterwards, Ms Funk, being 82, was able to claim the record for the oldest person in space - a title she has now relinquished to Mr Shatner.

The launch comes amid claims that Blue Origin has a toxic work culture and failed to adhere to proper safety protocols. The mostly anonymous accusations made by former and present employees have been strenuously denied.

"That just hasn't been my experience at Blue," countered Audrey Powers, who is responsible for mission and flight operations.

"We're exceedingly thorough, from the earliest days up through now as we've started our human flights. Safety has always been our top priority."

William Shatner may have been the first person to go from Star Trek's version of space to the real thing - but three Nasa astronauts have made the opposite journey.

Mae Jemison appeared in an episode of TV sequel Star Trek: The Next Generation, while Mike Fincke and Terry Virts turned up in the final episode of Enterprise, the Star Trek prequel series.

Also providing a link are Gene Roddenberry, the franchise creator, and James Doohan, the actor who played Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in the original 1960s series and subsequent films. Both men had their ashes sent into space.

Space tourism is going through something of a renaissance, currently.

Throughout the 2000s a number of high-value individuals paid to visit the International Space Station (ISS). But these flights, organised under the patronage of the Russian space agency, ceased in 2009.

Now, the sector is being rekindled, and this time it looks more resilient, simply because there are many more private space companies chasing the business, and this should bring down prices for a wider pool of customers.

As well as the New Shepard trips organised by Jeff Bezos, the British entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson is offering rides in his Virgin Galactic rocket plane.

And then, of course, there's Elon Musk, whose Dragon capsule will send people orbital, to circle the Earth for several days - as it did for the privately funded Inspiration4 crew last month.

While Mr Bezos simply invites some people to fly on New Shepard, he is selling other seats. And whereas Sir Richard Branson puts a ticket price (from $450,000; £330,000) against the journey, the Amazon founder does not disclose the fees paid by the likes of Mr Boshuizen and Mr de Vries.

Blue Origin is planning one more crewed flight this year, with several more crewed flights planned for 2022.

The crew went to inspect their rocket booster after landing

William Shatner goes to space on Blue Origin mission

By Jackie Wattles , Meg Wagner , Melissa Macaya, Mike Hayes, Melissa Mahtani and Veronica Rocha , CNN

"I’m overwhelmed," Shatner says after 11-minute trip into space

Actor William Shatner, best known for playing Captain Kirk on "Star Trek," described his journey into space as overwhelming and something everybody should experience.

“I’m overwhelmed. I had no idea. We were talking earlier, yeah, it’s going to be different – whatever that phrase is that you have a different view of things, it doesn’t begin to explain, to describe what, for me," he said upon exiting his Blue Origin flight.

Shatner made history today, becoming the oldest person to travel to space at age 90.

"Maybe you could put it on 3D and wear the goggles to have that experience,” Shatner suggested to Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos.

Blue Origin passengers given flight wings from Jeff Bezos

William Shatner , who at 90 years old just became the oldest person to travel to space, received flight wings from Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos alongside the three other passengers.

The wings are from Blue Origin and are not official wings from the Federal Aviation Administration's Commercial Astronaut Wings Program.

Bezos in July went to the edge of space with the first-ever crewed mission for Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital space tourism rocket.

An emotional William Shatner says "I hope I can maintain what I feel now. I don't want to lose it."

Back on Earth, William Shatner grew emotional describing his experience launching into space

"I'm so filled with emotion about what just happened. It's extraordinary, extraordinary. I hope I can maintain what I feel now. I don't want to lose it. It's so much larger than me and life."

Speaking to Jeff Bezos after the Blue Origin flight, the 90-year-old actor told him: "What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine."

He continued: "It hasn't got anything to do with the little green men and the blue orb. It has to do with the enormity and the quickness and the suddenness of life and death."

William Shatner and crew emerge from Blue Origin capsule after space flight

From CNN's Aditi Sangal

After William Shatner and the rest of the crew landed back on Earth, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos opened the capsule hatch and said, "Hello astronauts, welcome to Earth!"

Audrey Powers was the first to emerge out of the capsule, followed by Shatner.

Bezos welcomed the crew members back in his Blue Origin space suit along with the members' families.

William Shatner makes history as oldest person to go to space

From CNN's Jackie Wattles

Ninety-year-old William Shatner, who gained fame portraying Captain Kirk on the original "Star Trek," just hitched a ride aboard a suborbital spacecraft that grazed the edge of outer space before parachuting to a landing, making Shatner the oldest person ever to travel to space.

Shatner took off aboard a New Shepard spacecraft — the one developed by Jeff Bezos' rocket company, Blue Origin, and the same vehicle that took Bezos himself to space this summer — just before 10:50 a.m. ET from Blue Origin’s West Texas launch site.

Bezos, a lifelong "Star Trek" fan, flew Shatner as a comped guest. With him were three crewmates: Chris Boshuizen, a co-founder of satellite company Planet Labs, and software executive Glen de Vries, who are both paying customers, and Audrey Powers, Blue Origin's vice president of mission and flight operations.

The trip took just 10 minutes from takeoff to landing. The crew experienced about three minutes of weightlessness at the top of their flight path before their capsule deployed parachutes to slow their descent and touched back down near their Texas launch site.

Shanter's new record as the oldest person to fly to space one-ups the record set just three months ago by 82-year-old Wally Funk, who was previously denied the opportunity to fly by NASA in the 1960s before she joined Bezos on his July flight.

Capsule carrying crew returns to Earth

The capsule carrying the crew aboard the Blue Origin flight has returned and just landed on Earth.

Actor William Shatner could be heard saying, "That was unlike anything they described."

Shatner became the oldest person to travel to space.

Shatner tweeted an Isaac Newton quote as he arrived in space

William Shatner's official Twitter account sent out a quote from Sir Isaac Newton as the 90-year-old crossed into space.

The tweet read: "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, diverting myself in now & then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

See the tweet:

The booster has landed

The New Shepard's booster has now landed. We're still waiting for the capsule, carrying the crew, to land.

Crew will start feeling weightlessness

The crew abroad the Blue Origin flight should now start feeling weightlessness.

They will be allowed to unstrap from their seats and float in the capsule.

The crew capsule soared past the Kármán Line, the internationally recognized boundary of space, and has now reached the top of its flight path.

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Our Strange New Era of Space Travel

Humans last set foot on the moon 50 years ago. Now we’re going back, but the way we explore space has gone through some big changes.

In December of 1972, the astronaut Eugene Cernan left his footprints and daughter’s initials in the lunar dust. In doing so, he became the last man to set foot on the moon. Now, after 50 years, humanity is going back . But in the half century since Apollo 17, a lot has changed in how we explore space—and how we see our place in it.

While those early missions were all run by governments, much of modern spaceflight is the domain of billionaires and their private companies. Commercial space travel has brought a new way of thinking about trips outside Earth’s gravity, with tourism turning space into a vacation and something of a status symbol. It’s also widened the range of people who go to space from the clean-cut white male astronauts of the Apollo era.

New visitors bring new perspectives to space, and that diversity could well change our relationship to it. A year ago, at 90 years old, the actor William Shatner rode one of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin spacecraft. But as he told staff writer Marina Koren, his time in space didn’t line up with the optimism of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk.

Koren and fellow staff writer Adam Harris discuss our changing relationship with space on an episode of the podcast Radio Atlantic . They also listen to some of Koren’s interview with Shatner. You can hear their conversation here:

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic . I’m Adam Harris.

Marina Koren: And I’m Marina Koren.

Harris: This week on the show, we’re talking about space. We just heard some of our colleagues’ kids talking about space. As a parent myself, it feels like the images of space are inescapable. One of the first T-shirts I remember buying for my daughter was a NASA T-shirt. We have blankets in our house that have moons and rocket ships on them. Is that your recollection of childhood?

Koren: Definitely. I had those glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling. Occasionally one would fall off and spook me, but I recently got a set for my 3-year old nephew. This is a go-to source of wonder and excitement for kids, for sure.

Harris: And I should say that we are both staff writers, but you are the one on the space beat.

Koren: Yes, I am The Atlantic ’s outer space bureau chief.

Harris: ( Laughs. ) And it’s been a big year to be a space reporter, right?

Koren: It has, yeah! We are definitely in this strange new era of exploration. It’s been 50 years since the last time human beings have set foot on the moon. 1972 was Apollo 17, the final moon landing.

I think the universe is a lot more familiar to us now, because we’ve come such a long way. But something that’s really different now is that you have commercial companies that are doing the work that was traditionally done by governments. There’s SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company, and Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s venture.

And even 10 years ago, if you told someone that SpaceX will be launching people to the International Space Station, they might have laughed at you. It seemed ridiculous, but this is the reality now.

It feels like we’re in this strange sci-fi future where space travel is something you can buy. It’s a type of vacation. And it’s become a status symbol in a way.

But now people can go to space and come back and tell everyone: “Well, I’ve been to space. I’ve done something that only about 600 or so people have done in the history of humankind.”

Harris: Before private space travel, [when you think of people going to space,] you think of folks like John Glenn or Buzz Aldrin. It’s someone with military training who has studied to be an astronaut like their entire life. What does it mean that that’s no longer the only type of person that’s going into space?

Koren: I think that spaceflight is about to get really, really interesting because the stories that we’ve heard from spacefarers have come from a specific group of people. These were, more often than not, white men with military backgrounds, trained in a certain workplace culture that values “the Right Stuff.” It values being stoic and unafraid in the face of something dangerous.

But in this new era of commercial spaceflight, you’re gonna be seeing a wide range of participants. There will hopefully be more women, more people of color, people from underrepresented groups, from different educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, and people with just a wide range of experiences.

Harris: And what are the stories that we’ve already heard about the experiences in space, right? These professional astronauts, when they come back, what do they say space was like?

Koren: Yeah, there are a few common themes. So people, when these astronauts have gone to space and they’ve seen Earth from that perspective, they have been overcome with emotion at the beauty of Earth. And it suddenly becomes very clear just how thin our atmosphere is. And that is the only thing that really protects our planet from everything else. They’re struck by the fragility of the planet.

And then something else also happens to a lot of astronauts when they go to space—they suddenly feel a sense of connectedness with their fellow human beings down below. Because from space, you can’t see any national borders. It’s just continents and seas and clouds. And so, many astronauts have come home and described these feelings. And the stories are indicative of a cognitive shift, almost, that is known as “the overview effect.”

And I’ve talked to astronauts who say that they were taken aback by the borderless world and how beautiful it is, how it made them feel like: Why are we at war? Why is there conflict? We’re one planet. It made them feel whole.

I’ve also talked to one academic who did an extensive study of astronauts—and she couldn’t reveal this astronaut’s name to me—but she said that this person, when he went into space, he took one look out the window and was convinced that humanity was going to destroy itself in some hundred-number of years. And so that experience could be profound and inspiring to one person, but it could also actually make another feel despair.

And what’s happening now with space tourism and private spaceflight is that the people going into space now have heard these stories of the overview effect. It’s a thing. And so they’re expecting to feel a certain way when they go to space. They’re expecting to have a profound change on their perspective of the world, and even maybe on their personalities. And so I wonder if we’re kind of over-hyping that. And I have talked to a few professional NASA astronauts who agree. They worry that these spaceflight companies and their sales pitches to customers are overselling the effects of the overview effect. It’s not a guarantee. It’s not a gift from the universe. It’s something that a person experiences and feels individually. And your mileage will vary.

Harris: Yeah. And you said these flights are like a couple of minutes. Is that enough time to change you?

Koren: That is a great question. So I talked to Frank White, the author who coined the term “the overview effect.” He came up with it when he was flying on a plane—so, not in space, but he had a pretty good view—and he got to thinking: Future generations of humans who might be living and working in space would have this distant view of Earth all the time. And they would have these insights that regular earthbound people lack.

And he was surprised that people who were flying on Blue Origin and having a few minutes of weightlessness were coming home and talking as if they had had this profound experience. They were saying it changed them. And he was surprised because he thought that in order to really get the full hit of the overview effect, you had to spend some time in space. Weeks to months in orbit around Earth, or even all the way out on the moon.

So, that’s kind of the literature that we’re working with here. And I think that’s what’s going to change in this era of commercial spaceflight, because you are going to have people who are not like the Apollo astronauts. And they’re going to be coming home with different stories and really widening the overview effect that we’ve become familiar with as a public.

And the future participants won’t be restricted by some of the constraints that the professional astronauts were. If you were a professional astronaut and you went to space and you didn’t have a great time, I don’t think you could say that once you came back from space, because that could potentially affect your future flight assignments. You had to have a certain response on your way home. And so I think we’re about to hear some of the most honest stories of spaceflight that we’ve ever heard before.

Harris: Is the overview effect real? If we only have this limited pool of stories to pull from, is that theory a real thing? Have all of the folks who have gone up to space shared that view?

Koren: That’s a great question. And I think the way we talk about the overview effect, it becomes like this mystical, magical thing. Astronauts are revered people. Even when I’ve interviewed astronauts, when they walk into the room in their full flight suits with all their mission patches on the fabric, you can’t help but feel intimidated. Because you think: Wow, this person has seen something that I’ve never seen.

And so we think of the overview effect and the experience that people should have in space as something that the universe gives us. But it’s actually a cultural phenomenon. It has been shaped by a certain group of people working under a certain set of pressures who wanted to make sure that they could fly again.

So they couldn’t say anything outrageous. And the overview effect also came out of a certain time and place. Many of these stories come from the midst of the space race, in the middle of the Cold War. That definitely shapes a person’s perspective. So I would say that seeing Earth from space is not a one-size-fits-all reaction.

Harris: What are some of the interviews that stuck out because they may have differed from this idea of an overview effect?

Koren: So I spoke with William Shatner about his space flight. He was 90 years old when he took that trip. I recorded some of my conversation with Shatner. And he said it was a really transformational experience, but not for the reasons that we’re used to hearing.

Harris: So you got to talk to Captain Kirk?

Koren: I did, yes! I will admit: I have never seen Star Trek before.

Harris: So we have a space reporter who’s never seen Star Trek ?

Koren: ( Laughs. ) I haven’t. But you’ve seen it, right?

Harris: I have seen Star Trek . It was playing pretty frequently on our TVs when I was a kid. My dad rarely missed episodes or reruns. [But] for people like Marina who don’t know who Captain Kirk is: He’s the captain of the starship Enterprise on Star Trek in the 1960s. The original captain. And he was this really optimistic figure—this really sort of classical hero. [But] what did Shatner have to say about going to space? Actually being there?

Koren: When I talked to him, it was about a year after his experience, and the flight was still really fresh in his mind. I asked him how he was feeling a year out, and he dove right into a Shatner-esque monologue about going to space.

William Shatner: We had emerged from the film of air that surrounds the Earth, and we’re weightless. I got out of my five-point harness and made my way to the window. I saw a wake of air. Like a submarine might leave in the water.

And then I looked to my right, which was facing space. When I looked up there, I saw nothing but blank, palpable space. The blackness was so overwhelming. My immediate thought was: My God, that’s death .

And then I looked back, and I could see with great clarity the beginning of the circumference line of the Earth. The color of the desert that I had just left, which was beige. The whiteness of the clouds. The blueness of the air. And those three colors in deference to the blackness—I was overwhelmed by the sense of death and overwhelmed by the sense of nurturing by the Earth.

Koren: When Shatner came back from his quick trip to space, he’s standing outside the capsule; there’s other people around him. Jeff Bezos is there. Bezos is popping champagne like a frat boy. And Shatner is just standing there, super still.

Shatner: I didn’t know what I was feeling, but I was weeping, and I didn’t know why. Everybody else was celebrating. It took me a couple of hours sitting by myself to understand that what I was feeling was grief. And the grief was for the Earth.

Koren: He is overcome with emotion. He is weeping, and then he starts saying how he was just taken aback by the blackness of space, the ugliness of space, how it looked like death.

So Shatner was super, super honest about his experience. And when I talked to him, he said that that grief was still with him. Earth was beautiful and gleaming and delicate from that perspective, but it just reminded him of everything that’s wrong on the ground and particularly made him think about how unstoppable climate change feels.

And so for him, this was in many ways a negative experience. And Shatner was starting to cry when we were talking about it, because the experience is so fresh in his mind and nothing about climate change and the prognosis there has really changed in the last year since he went to space. So that grief was still with him.

Harris: How was his experience different from what he may have imagined that he would feel after going up to space?

Koren: He told me that he expected to see Earth and just be reminded of how beautiful and wonderful this planet is. I think he expected it to be reaffirming in a positive way. And it’s interesting to think of this man who played a character who was this really big space optimist in real life going to space, and his initial emotional reaction to that is grief and sadness and all kinds of negative emotion.

I think what Shatner shares with other astronauts is: When people have gone to space, they have felt an overwhelming desire to take care of the planet. You really see that this is all there is. This is all we know, at least. And if this is our one home on this floating ball of rock in the void, then we should take care of it.

And so, you know, there’s a case to be made that the more people go up into space, that feeling will trickle down and lead to some type of meaningful improvement on Earth.

Harris: If somebody gives you a ticket on a $20 million flight, you’re not gonna be able to say, “Well, that wasn’t exactly what I expected it to be.” But Shatner was able to do something different. Why was his experience different from others who have been up to space and came back down and just said, “Oh, it was great. Thanks, Jeff Bezos, for putting me on this flight”?

Koren: I mean, William Shatner is William Shatner, right? He was 90 years old during his space flight. He’s Captain Kirk. I think he doesn’t owe Jeff Bezos anything. Yes, Bezos comped his ticket, and that’s lovely. But someone like William Shatner going into space can come back and say what they want, because the public looks at them in a different way. If a very wealthy person decides to comp the tickets for an electrician [or] for a nurse, and they go up and come down, can they speak their minds very freely? I don’t know.

Harris: Say a billionaire called you up and was like: “Hey, Marina, love your stories. You wanna go to space?” Would you go if you got the opportunity?

Koren: Oh man, well, there would be some conversation about journalistic ethics. But would I ever go to space? I’m gonna say no.

Harris: Really?

Koren: Because spaceflight is risky. You never know what might happen, what could happen. I don’t wanna die on the job not having filed my story. Like, if something happens—if I’m somehow incapacitated, I come back and I can’t write the story—that will haunt me. ( Laughs. )

Planes freak me out. I still can’t believe that we can get planes off the ground and land them back in one piece. And, you know, space is not at that level yet, but maybe someday it will be. And that’s pretty wild to think about.

Harris: Actually, to that point, thousands of people fly at high altitudes every day. Do you think that there’s a future where spaceflight is going to feel as sort of commonplace as taking a flight to LaGuardia?

Koren: I think that future is possible. I think what we have to be careful about is making too many promises. If you listen to Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos talk about spaceflight right now, they’re suggesting that this future is happening, like, next week. And I don’t think that future will happen that quickly. It’s true that more people than before are going to have the opportunity to go to space now. I’m not sure if in my lifetime there are going to be spaceships full of people going to the moon.

I mean, there might be. SpaceX and Elon Musk are working really, really hard to make that future reality. SpaceX’s next-generation moon rocket could reach orbit as early as next year. SpaceX has already sold tickets to people to go on a trip around the moon. These things are happening. How quickly they become reality, I don’t know. Maybe 50 years from now when we’re a hundred years out from the Apollo-program anniversary, maybe it will feel a bit more mundane, just like a plane ride.

Harris: Is some of the mystique fading from space, or space travel? Are we sort of becoming desensitized to space travel? Those first couple of commercial flights, it was all 24-hour news cycle. They broadcast all of them. But that sort of slowed down. Are we sort of becoming desensitized to the awe and wonder of space travel?

Koren: I think that’s possible. I think of the Earthrise picture taken by the Apollo 8 crew in 1968. That picture was mind-blowing to people. They’d never seen Earth like this before. Fifty years later, I think our brains are so spoiled by special effects that I do wonder if the sight of Earth from space is going to be that shocking. Especially when you have so many people going into orbit and coming back and posting on Instagram like: “Here’s what it looks like.” I do wonder if we’ve seen so much incredible CGI, if our modern brains might be less impressed by the view than maybe people were in the 1960s. But I also don’t know if that’s just some dumb Millennial take.

Harris: It’s like if somebody goes up, and they’re like: “This isn’t what Interstellar looked like.”

Koren: ( Laughs. ) “Where’s the wormhole?”

Harris: “I was expecting a wormhole.” And all they see is, as Shatner said, this great blackness of space.

William Shatner will launch into space with Blue Origin on Oct. 12

The rumors had been swirling.

Actor William Shatner, at left, and Blue Origin Vice President of Mission & Flight Operations, at right, will fill the final two seats on the Oct. 12, 2021, New Shepard crewed flight.

Captain Kirk will boldly go where some men have gone before, on a suborbital flight aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard launch system.

Actor William Shatner of "Star Trek" fame and Blue Origin 's Audrey Powers, the vice president of missions and flight operations, will fill the last two seats on the company's second crewed flight, due to blast off from New Shepard's west Texas launch site in just over a week, on Oct. 12. Rumors were swirling in late September that the 90-year-old actor would be on the company's second flight, which today's announcement confirms.

"So now I can say something," Shatner wrote on Twitter today. "Yes, it's true; I'm going to be a 'rocket man!'"

Shatner and his crewmates will fly just shy of three months after New Shepard's first crewed flight , which carried the company's founder, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and three other passengers on a 10-minute flight that reached 66.5 miles (107 kilometers) in altitude.

"I've heard about space for a long time now," Shatner said in a Blue Origin statement . "I'm taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle."

In photos : Blue Origin's 1st New Shepard passenger launch with Jeff Bezos

The announcement comes just days after nearly two dozen current and former Blue Origin employees published an essay on a site called Lioness highlighting concerns about the company's safety practices and overall culture. Notably, the essay stated that, "Many of this essay's authors say they would not fly on a Blue Origin vehicle."

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When asked for comment about the claims in the essay, a Blue Origin spokesperson said, "We stand by our safety record and believe that New Shepard is the safest space vehicle ever designed or built."

Powers, who appears to be flying in her official capacity rather than as a paying customer, spoke to similar points in the statement announcing her flight.

"I'm so proud and humbled to fly on behalf of Team Blue, and I'm excited to continue writing Blue's human spaceflight history," she said. "I was part of the amazing effort we assembled for New Shepard's Human Flight Certification Review, a years-long initiative completed in July 2021. As an engineer and lawyer with more than two decades of experience in the aerospace industry, I have great confidence in our New Shepard team and the vehicle we’ve developed."

Related : Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin faces scathing criticism of safety and culture

— William Shatner releases new album, may reach space — Blue Origin: Quiet plans for spaceships — Jeff Bezos: Blue Origin and Amazon founder

Shatner and Powers will join two previously announced passengers: Chris Boshuizen, co-founder of Earth observation company Planet Labs, and Glen de Vries, vice chair for life sciences and healthcare at French software company Dassault Systèmes, whose flight plans were announced on Sept. 27.

The flight will make Shatner the oldest person to reach space, surpassing the record set during the July flight by 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk , whom Bezos personally invited to join his crew. The oldest person to reach orbital space is John Glenn , also the first American to reach orbital space, who made a last flight at age 77.

Blue Origin has not publicly announced the cost of a ride on New Shepard. The company sold a seat on its first crewed mission at auction for $28 million, but the winning bidder chose not to join the flight after all.

At least for that flight, Blue Origin also included a strict list of eligibility requirements , including height and weight restrictions. Passengers also needed to be able to climb seven flights of stairs in 90 seconds and remain in a reclined seat for at least 90 minutes.

Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @ meghanbartels . Follow us on Twitter @ Spacedotcom and on Facebook .

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Meghan is a senior writer at Space.com and has more than five years' experience as a science journalist based in New York City. She joined Space.com in July 2018, with previous writing published in outlets including Newsweek and Audubon. Meghan earned an MA in science journalism from New York University and a BA in classics from Georgetown University, and in her free time she enjoys reading and visiting museums. Follow her on Twitter at @meghanbartels.

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William Shatner Hopes His Ecological Children’s Album Inspires People to Wake Up to Climate Change

The 93-year-old icon talks music, AI, going up into space and which song he's most proud of.

By Joe Lynch

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Though his new album is a children’s record, the recently released Where Will the Animals Sleep: Songs For Kids And Other Living Things is no lark. It’s a stylistically playful but thematically serious album that touches on climate change and the interconnectedness of life on earth. Songs like “Elephants and Termites” aren’t cutesy sing-alongs; they’re fact-based ecological lessons for kids delivered by a 93-year-old whose interest in the natural world around us still exudes a healthy childlike wonder.

Well, maybe. I wouldn’t say no. But what really is the inspiration is reading, studying, I guess, over the years and my understanding of how intertwined all of life is. For example, I’m now discovering that a single-cell animal in the primitive ocean absorbed another cell that had mitochondria in it [and] became energized by the mitochondria’s energy. And that single-cell entity became the forebear of everything that’s on earth. When you think of the incredible, complex and yet simple line of evolution from the beginning in the ocean… everything grew from the other. And then that becomes us and modern humanity has lost the concept that we belong to everything else. The idea that we are superior and we have dominion over nature? It’s an illusion. We’re all connected. If something breaks in this scheme of life, we’re all affected, as we can see it happening now. We’re on the edge. There are discoveries in science every day that are profound and yet we’re on the edge of disaster with global warming. [His dog starts barking.] That dog, for example, is following its intuition to guard; it’s a Doberman watching the street below it. Max, Max, that’s enough! [laughs]. You can see that dog just listened to me — they’re talking to us. The intelligence level of everything is enormous, we just think they’re dumb because they don’t communicate like we do. Octopus are highly intelligent and, in all likelihood, talking to each other. What I’m saying is, this album is a result of me reading, studying and listening and being so moved by this story of the voyage of life.

I can see what you’re talking about in “Elephants and Termites,” which you released a video for. It’s not just a silly song — it has details about how an elephant scratching its back on a mound created by termites could lead to an entire little ecosystem.

That has a great deal of wonder to it, doesn’t it? A hole in the ground from that action becomes a source of life for lifeforms all around.

When you were a child, did you have this interest in the natural world?

No, no, no. It’s not something a child or a young adult thinks of. My life is filled with young adults and it’s all about school and “what college am I going to go to?” They’re totally consumed with making their life. The exceptional child might discover what we’re talking about, but generally speaking, people of a certain age are just involved with existing and their own self. There’s no room in their lives to take the time to examine the world around them, unless they’re exceptional kids. I think this comes later in life. You look around, think, “What’s the meaning of it? Why am I here? What am I doing and where am I going?” Those questions only occur to most people later in life. But it’s a shame because all those thoughts add depth to their life. If at a young age you have an insight into how brief life is, you’re motivated to make your life as meaningful as possible. Which doesn’t mean inventing something strange and interesting, it means building your life with love and appreciation and doing good things for people.

So you made this album with Robert Sharenow, as well as Dan Miller of They Might Be Giants. What is it like working with them?

There’s nature again.

I know. So Dan and Rob were musicians together and eventually Dan went on to be a professional musician and Robert went elsewhere. But Robert had written musicals for his university and wrote a novel that won a prize. And I had no idea he was a writer. And he says, “We should do an album together,” and I’m, “Yeah, let’s do an album!” I come up with some ideas then Robert starts to write and I think, “Ah! These are great words.” We suddenly catch fire and start writing. We wrote, I don’t know, 30 songs, that became an album called Bill [from 2021] that’s out there now. We bonded and thought, “Let’s do another album” and we did this album on the idea of the connectedness of nature.

All of this reminds me of your performance of “So Fragile, So Blue” that was filmed for You Can Call Me Bill. I found your performance and the message very moving.

My dream is that we get a lot of personalities to say, “What can we do?” if it comes out as a music video. We’re working on that.

But as you say, there’s so much else going on in the news. Plus, people have their lives, their career, it’s easy to ignore the bigger picture of our planet.

That’s exactly right. We’re so overwhelmed, especially nowadays, with existing. We find it hard to remember the rest of the world which has its own miracle of existence. We’ve heard so many times that global warming can wipe out human beings, but given a short period of time, the earth can renew and something else could take our place, if that was the case.

I went up into space [in 2021] and came down. I was weeping after and I didn’t know why. Then I realized, there was sorrow – I was mourning the earth that I saw. What I’m realizing now is that there’s a fervent amount of work being done by scientists around the world to come up with a solution to global warming: to take the carbon dioxide and methane out of the air, to take the plastics out of the ocean, to purify our water and different farming techniques. We abound with knowledge of how to save the earth. It’s amazing what science is doing right now. If we can hang on for a while, science may absolve us of things it created in the first place.

What do you think about AI? People of course talk about its dangers, but I wonder if it couldn’t be used to solve some of these ecological problems we’re talking about.

I’m in the same boat as everybody else. The solution is human beings wanting to do something about it. To have a political group saying it doesn’t exist is like sitting in the electric chair and saying the electricity is going to go out. It’s absurd. The first thing we need is all of humanity to say, “My God, we’re approaching the end, we have to do something about it, united.” The second thing is to do something literally about it and I think it can be done. If we’re aided by AI, that’s only to our benefit.

In the last decade or so, you’ve been incredibly prolific in music, specifically. What is it about music making that is so attractive to you?

Well, I’m glad you’re with Billboard , I don’t mind talking to Billboard . I’ve loved music for the longest time. As a kid, in my parents’ home, they didn’t play much music. I’ve long been in awe of classical music and the sound of the human voice, whether it’s the trained voice of the opera singer or the melodic voice of the crooner and everything in between.

I love your cover of that song, truly. Before I leave you, I wanted to ask about Roger Corman, who died recently. You gave a magnificent performance in his 1962 film The Intruder, which was a daring movie.

I wrote a note somewhere saying the movie he and I did together was very risky. Our lives were at risk at times because it was about integration. The courage he showed — the bravery and the energy — I’ve never forgotten it. Although we didn’t communicate much in the last many years, I thought of him.

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America’s first Black astronaut candidate gets to space on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket and beats William Shatner as oldest person in the final frontier

Ed Dwight attends "The Space Race" screening

America’s first Black astronaut candidate finally rocketed into space 60 years later, flying with Jeff Bezos’ rocket company on Sunday.

Ed Dwight was an Air Force pilot when President John F. Kennedy championed him as a candidate for NASA’s early astronaut corps. But he wasn’t picked for the 1963 class.

Dwight, now 90, got to experience a few minutes of weightlessness with five other passengers aboard the Blue Origin capsule as it skimmed space.

Launch officials said all of the astronauts were well shortly after the capsule parachuted down after a flight of roughly 10 minutes.

The brief flight from West Texas made Dwight the new record-holder for oldest person in space — nearly two months older than “Star Trek” actor William Shatner was when he went up in 2021.

It was Blue Origin’s first crew launch in nearly two years. The company was grounded following a 2022 accident in which the booster came crashing down but the capsule full of experiments safely parachuted to the ground. Flights resumed last December, but with no one aboard. This was Blue Origin’s seventh time flying space tourists.

Dwight, a sculptor from Denver, was joined by four business entrepreneurs from the U.S. and France and a retired accountant. Their ticket prices were not disclosed; Dwight’s seat was sponsored in part by the nonprofit Space for Humanity.

Dwight was among the potential astronauts the Air Force recommended to NASA. But he wasn’t chosen for the 1963 class, which included eventual Gemini and Apollo astronauts, including Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. NASA didn’t select Black astronauts until 1978, and Guion Bluford became the first African American in space in 1983. Three years earlier, the Soviets launched the first Black astronaut, Arnaldo Tamayo Mendez, a Cuban of African descent.

After leaving the military in 1966, Dwight joined IBM and started a construction company, before earning a master’s degree in sculpture in the late 1970s. He’s since dedicated himself to art. His sculptures focus on Black history and include memorials and monuments across the country. Several of his sculptures have flown into space.

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What will it take for William Shatner to reprise ‘Star Trek’ role? ‘Injection of speed’

Beam him up, Scotty.

William Shatner exclusively told The Post what it would take for him to return for another “Star Trek” project.

“An injection of speed or something,” the 93-year-old actor said with a laugh while promoting his new children’s album, “Where Will the Animals Sleep? — Songs for Kids and Other Living Things!”

“I don’t know,” he added. “It’s a commitment I don’t know if I’m ready to make at this point in my life.”

Shatner played the popular Capt. James T. Kirk in the original run of the sci-fi series from 1966 to 1969 and in several “Star Trek” films.

All these years later, Shatner has nothing but fond memories about the job that made him a household name.

“What I loved most about playing Captain Kirk was the writing. The way they wrote for the character was wonderful,” he said. “It was a real kick, a real joy to try and find ways of playing what they wrote for me.”

Shatner is best known for his “Star Trek” role, but he’s just a regular guy to his family. In fact, he said that his own grandkids aren’t Trekkies.

“I don’t know that they’re aficionados,” the dad of three said, adding, “They’re not. They haven’t seen much of it. I’m not a prophet in my own life. Just grandpa. Pops.”

Actor Paul Wesley took over the character in the Paramount+ show “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” which debuted in 2022.

“He’s actually a lovely guy. He’s been nothing but supportive, which obviously means the world to me, because his support is all that really matters,” Wesley exclusively told The Post about Shatner in March.

“Did I feel pressure? Yes. Oh, my God. Are you kidding me?” he went on. “I was, like, ‘OK, do I do an impression of William Shatner? Do I do my own thing?’ I ended up going, ‘I’m going to do my own thing,’ because it’s free enterprise. I’m going to try to create my own career, maybe have him slowly develop into more of the Shatner version of Kirk.”

In 2021, Shatner had a real-life “Star Trek” experience when he flew to space on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin shuttle .

In January, it was reported that the ashes of the series’ creator, Gene Roddenberry, and his wife, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, who played nurse Christine Chapel on the TV show, would be sent to space on a United Launch Alliance rocket, appropriately named Vulcan Centaur. Also scheduled to take flight were the remains of the late “Star Trek” actors DeForest Kelley, who played Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy; James Doohan, who portrayed engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott; and Nichelle Nichols, who starred as communications officer Lt. Uhura.

“The universe changes so rapidly,” he said. “There’s such a ferment going on in the universe, which includes us. Tectonic plates move and stars explode and your ashes … I don’t know. It’s a desire for immortality, and I don’t believe that exists.”

Although Shatner has been successful in his career, the two-time Emmy Award winner said that he wants to be remembered for “raising money for people in need,” rather than his acting performances.

“I don’t think there is such a thing as legacy. You know, I mean, who remembers? Leonard [Nimoy] for example, was so popular and played such a great character [Spock] and all that kind of thing,” he said about his late “Star Trek” co-star, who died in 2015 at 83.

“But, you know, if you say to somebody, ‘Who was Spock?’ they barely know. What is it,

10 years later? He’s barely being remembered in terms of, ‘Oh, my God, Spock.’ It’s all disappearing.”

“The only legacy, in my opinion, that’s worth anything is helping other people,” Shatner continued. “And that reverberates till the end of time. You help somebody, they help somebody else. Suddenly there’s this whole activity going. I think you need to help other people, whether it’s financially or physically, and that’s your legacy.”

Shatner’s new children’s album is out now.

What will it take for William Shatner to reprise ‘Star Trek’ role? ‘Injection of speed’

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SpaceX’s facilities, including several prototype Starship rockets, behind a row of new homes in Boca Chica, Texas.

Opinion Guest Essay

Try Living in Elon Musk’s Company Town

Credit... Mike Osborne for The New York Times

Supported by

By Christopher Hooks

Photographs by Mike Osborne

Mr. Hooks is a writer based in Austin, Texas.

May 24, 2024

J ust after 7 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 18, as the sun was rising in the Gulf of Mexico, Noel Rangel, a 26-year-old native of Brownsville, Texas, was brought unwillingly into wakefulness by an uninvited sensation: The richest man in the world was shaking him. Or rather, his entire apartment. His bed was rumbling, his windows rattling. “I could hear the glass,” he said. He was confused. He woke as if Elon Musk himself had grabbed him by the shoulders.

Americans as a whole have become more familiar with the tax that powerful and erratic figures levy on people’s emotional and mental well-being. Though many very rich men fantasize about disconnecting from other humans — to go to space, or, in the case of the tech billionaire Peter Thiel, to create artificial cities in international waters — they are more desperate for social validation, not less. They need to inspire love or fear or awe.

Many people suspect that Donald Trump — though he denies it — ran for president in part because he was tired of being mocked so often. Jeff Bezos spent $42 million to build a mechanical clock under a West Texas mountain that is intended to last 10,000 years. Mr. Musk spent $44 billion of mostly other people’s money to buy Twitter, rebrand it as X and guarantee that he could continue to irritate people on a global scale.

For Mr. Rangel, what was figurative for others had become literal: When a tycoon stomps, the earth shakes. Mr. Musk’s company SpaceX had launched a new iteration of its Starship rocket about 25 miles away. That one didn’t blow up over his city as previous launches had. But Mr. Rangel still couldn’t go back to sleep. Across social media, some residents shared his irritation at being roused by a launch they did not realize was coming.

Their irritation was perhaps surprising. Brownsville has become something of a company town for SpaceX, its largest private employer, and the most high-profile firm in the commercial space industry right now. Its more than 13,000 employees build rockets, launch NASA astronauts on their journeys to the International Space Station, provide broadband internet via satellite and are working toward an ambitious goal to send people to Mars one day.

Murals glorifying the company dot Brownsville’s downtown, which has been spruced up with donations from Mr. Musk. Businesses have reoriented to serve space tourists who flock from all over the world to see his rockets up close. To some, Mr. Musk has given Brownsville, a particularly poor city of about 200,000 in a neglected part of Texas, a reason for being, a future. To others, he’s a colonizer, flirting with white nationalists online while exploiting a predominantly brown work force in one of Texas’ fringes.

A mural that shows Elon Musk and images of SpaceX’s Tesla roadster that was launched into space. The words “Boca Chica to Mars” are painted in white capital letters.

Those debates have been reported in dozens of articles about Brownsville in the last decade. I suspect the real reason journalists keep coming to the city is that it serves as a stand-in for debates about America’s increasingly plutocrat-based economy and culture. NASA’s decades-long solar research program is called Living With a Star, signifying respect for a neighbor that is all-powerful and unaccountable. Brownsville is accruing data for a project that you might call Living With Elon.

A community organizer in the city who opposes SpaceX’s intrusion into Brownsville, Bekah Hinojosa, told me at length about the material concerns she had — pollution, the cost of living, the fragile environment around the company’s launchpad. But Ms. Hinojosa’s core complaint was that her native city didn’t feel like it belonged to her anymore, and that it felt as though public officials were changing the city to become a center for space tourism. It was a kind of psychological burden. “It’s exhausting,” she said. “We are constantly being bombarded by Elon Musk and SpaceX news down here.” There was the ever-present threat that “Elon might show up to charro days, or sombrero fest,” she said, referring to some of the local festivals. Most of all, she wished simply to stop having to think about him so much.

In that sense, we’re all living in Brownsville now.

I live about 300 miles from Brownsville, in Austin, Texas, where Mr. Musk moved in 2020. His presence here is felt very strongly: Residents whisper about his social life, and his companies’ health affects the real estate market. In 2022, he bought the website formerly known as Twitter, where I am still, as a journalist, effectively required to spend a good portion of my time online. Mr. Musk’s presence made both places worse, a little cheaper, a little phonier. His promises always seemed to fall flat, both the trivial (he vowed to eradicate bots, but now X is filled with automated porn ) and the consequential (he vowed to make his Tesla factory in Austin an “ecological paradise” but is now fighting to exempt it from environmental regulations).

Around that time, I started to consider how much of my adult life had been intimately shaped by billionaires and the otherwise very wealthy. The answer, I realized, was all of it. For a decade I’ve written about Texas politics, which is almost all reducible to fights between plutocrats belonging to different factions. I was a stenographer recording the symptoms of feuds between powerful men I’d never meet. National politics was not much different. At some point, it became more important to follow Thiel and Robert Mercer than the speaker of the House. Billionaires ran the new media (Mr. Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page) and the old (Rupert Murdoch, the Sinclair family). My childhood newspaper, The Austin American-Statesman, was gutted by the mismanagement of the Cox family, descendants of old-school media barons, and then sold to hedge-fund vultures. The chaos they created was inseparable from the chaos I was writing about in politics.

For all their wealth and power, these figures generally seem maladjusted, unhappy and insecure. Maybe that is to be expected. In 2012, social scientists found that those driving more valuable cars were less likely to stop for pedestrians at a crosswalk. If that’s what a slightly nicer whip does to the human brain, what does ten thousand million dollars do? What strange ideas might you develop about yourself? Would you feel bound by conventional morality? Would anyone around you seem real?

Mr. Musk seems even more disconnected to the bonds that tie the rest of us. He has talked often of his suspicion that the world around us is a computer simulation, which seems less of a philosophical inquiry than an explanation of how far he feels from human connection. When one of his children came out as trans and it was reported that she no longer talked to her father, he said , “Can’t win them all.” He has reportedly discouraged workers at his injury-prone factories from wearing brightly colored safety vests because he thinks them aesthetically displeasing.

He rages against the haters, the doubters, the clods who don’t understand his brilliance. But his complaints prove that he needs admiration more than anything. I was an admirer once: He built electric cars and rocket ships, what wasn’t to like? But while he retains a devoted fan base, it doesn’t seem to be enough. He seems most alive on his social media website, a place where everyone seems a little bit sad.

I n Brownsville, though, Mr. Musk has in the real world what he can’t quite grasp online — a captive audience, and people who need him, both for the material benefits he provides and the vision he offers to the town. Though he has detractors too, they’re greatly outnumbered by those who feel positively about the company. In elections, there’s no real anti-SpaceX faction: The powers that be are generally quite hostile to those who, like the organizer Ms. Hinojosa, speak up.

One of Brownsville’s strongest believers in the Musk project is Jessica Tetreau, a former city commissioner who was at City Hall the day the company’s representatives first came to town in 2011. Ms. Tetreau had a “very hard childhood” in Brownsville in the 1980s and ’90s, she said, when it was a place with “very limited opportunities.” When she was 2, her father was laid off when a Union Carbide chemical plant closed. For the rest of her childhood, she says, he had to travel regularly to Texas City to work at another Union Carbide plant.

When SpaceX first pitched Brownsville on building the launch site, Ms. Tetreau said, most city officials didn’t seem to get it. They joked off-mic about which locals they’d most like to send into orbit. But she lit up, immediately understanding that this was a big deal, that Brownsville could be part of something that would save humanity by paving man’s road to the stars. Ms. Tetreau went all in. She bought her first Tesla in 2015. She bought her children Tesla Cybertruck toys to play with and SpaceX blankets to cover themselves with at night.

She recounts the material benefits of SpaceX. Her constituents got good-paying jobs — a welding position currently advertised at the Brownsville facility starts at $18 per hour — in a region where the ship breaking industry was previously a primary source of employment. Two years ago, the city’s mayor told reporters SpaceX employed 1,600 people , and its presence netted $885 million in gross economic output for the county. Brownsville public school students got to broaden their horizons in programs held at the SpaceX production facility. In 2021, Mr. Musk pledged $30 million to local schools and a downtown Brownsville rejuvenation program — a substantial sum that amounts to about 0.01 percent of his current net worth.

But no less a boon was the fact that Brownsville could wrap itself in Mr. Musk’s expansive, and spiritual, vision for the company: its mission to, as Ms. Tetreau says, “preserve humanity and extend consciousness” with human settlement of the solar system. If the city once lacked hope for a better future, it could now consider itself part of the grand progression of human civilization.

Protective of the dream, Ms. Tetreau responds stiffly to criticism of Mr. Musk. I ask her about a Reuters report that Brownsville SpaceX workers are being injured at a rate six times that of the industry average, in part because Mr. Musk discourages the traditional safety practices (which he reportedly finds inefficient). She responds that she “never heard of anybody getting hurt.” She says that in person, Mr. Musk is “actually very genuine and kind and a humble person.” She asks SpaceX’s critics in Brownsville to remember that he just may be saving the human race.

Though I never felt as strongly in Mr. Musk’s promise as Ms. Tetreau did, I think I understand it. In a way, I envy it, in the same way I envy friends who have a strong and sincere religious belief. In writing about politics, I am struck forcefully again and again by the desire most people have to be part of a grand story, an exciting narrative that gives meaning to their lives. We live in an age of declining religious belief and existential unrest. Mr. Musk is offering the public a chance to be part of his grand narrative. It’s a kindness.

Just like actual religious belief, Musk fandom has the tendency to cloud people’s minds. The belief he provides in “the future” comes at a cost. Where some amount of natural beauty in utilitarian Texas has been preserved to the present day, it is often simply because the land is not useful.

Boca Chica, the little beach and wilderness area east of Brownsville where SpaceX launches rockets, wasn’t useful to anybody until the company came around. The flat scrubland and low dunes around Starbase, the somewhat grandiose name the company has given its industrial processing facility and chemical tank farms, aren’t much to look at. The area’s main virtue is that it is physically isolated from human populations — inaccessible to tourist beach towns to the north because of the Brownsville Ship Channel, cut off from the south by the Rio Grande and the Mexican border, and half an hour’s drive to Brownsville, the largest nearby city.

But this isolation made it a special place. Sea turtles left eggs along the beach. Dolphins shelter in the Laguna Madre, north of the launch site. Wildcats like ocelots roam the land; the last confirmed local sighting of a jaguarundi occurred nearby in 1986, and they may still be there. Most of all, the area is one of the best places for birding in the United States. The wetlands and sheltered beaches provide a perfect stopover for sea birds and migratory birds, some of whom rely on Boca Chica Beach to breed.

In 2021 , I tagged along with Stephanie Bilodeau, a biologist whose job it was to count local bird populations at Boca Chica — particularly the snowy plover, a comically small shorebird that lays eggs the size of Ping-Pong balls in the Boca Chica underbrush. Snowy plover populations have been in decline. Another type of bird that rested in the area, the biologist explained, migrated annually from the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic Circle and back — navigating with methods no scientist had yet been able to figure out. This was a much more impressive accomplishment than anything Neil Armstrong had done, I remember thinking, never having paid much attention to birds before.

We sat in the rain near the launchpad’s parking area, filled with Teslas. The nests the biologist counted were in steep decline. The beach nearby was dotted with chunks of steel, left from a recent catastrophic launch attempt that ended in what the company calls a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” Other failed launches and the normal operations of the facility may have dumped rocket fuel and industrial wastewater over the nearby wildlife refuge. I told Ms. Bilodeau that Mr. Musk had recently spoken about the possibility of bringing endangered species to Mars , letting them live on even if they went extinct at home. Did that seem feasible? “Probably not,” she said, looking defeated. I felt grateful for the work she did, and a bit sorry for her. She was like a village priest who keeps tidying the church as the years go by and the congregation thins.

M r. Musk has also seemed more defeated than usual lately, though it’s hard to say why. Partly, at least, it’s his mystification at the criticism he has received. “I’ve done more for the environment than any single human on earth,” he mopily told the New York Times journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin onstage at a DealBook conference in November. He had done capital-g Good, while his critics — in this case, those who were looking uneasily at his repeated affirmations of white nationalists and antisemites on the social media website he owned — only pretended to be good. (This was the interview in which Mr. Musk used a crude insult toward advertisers who pulled out of X because of his endorsement of antisemitic posts.)

Mr. Sorkin noted, in so many words, that Mr. Musk seemed sad, his mind stormy , that he seemed to be reaching for something he couldn’t grasp. In extended digressions that approximated a talk therapy session, Mr. Musk turned unprompted to SpaceX and seemed to suggest that it was a balm for the lack of meaning he perceived in the universe. “My motivation, then, was that well, my life is finite, really a flash in the pan, on a galactic time scale, but if we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness … maybe we can find out the meaning of life,” he said. As an example of the excitement we might find Out There, he asked: “Where are the aliens? Are there aliens? Is there new physics to discover?”

SpaceX hoped to present to other humans struggling with the big questions “the idea of us being a spacefaring civilization.” That’s the language Ms. Tetreau and so many others in Brownsville and elsewhere have picked up on: the idea that by “making humanity multiplanetary” by facilitating human settlement of Mars and beyond and by protecting sentience in case humans one day die off here, the “light of consciousness” will be preserved or extended.

It’s language that sounds as if it might come from an Eastern religion — taking the Dao to Pluto — or New Age syncretists . Mr. Musk has self-interested reasons to make this case, of course. If SpaceX has a spiritual mission, then he is a spiritual leader, all the better to receive the approval he seems to crave. In 2021, he argued that he shouldn’t pay higher taxes because it would interfere with his mission to “preserve the light of consciousness.”

But he clearly also believes it. And Mr. Musk is properly understood as a kind of spiritual leader. There’s something of a dividing line among SpaceX fans between engineer types who think the rockets are cool, and those who accept Mr. Musk’s premise that the company is saving the human race. He offers community. He offers hope.

Will any of it happen? It seems doubtful. SpaceX’s Starship has reached orbit. But regular safe transport to the Red Planet is a fabulously difficult proposition, the kind of project that could only be undertaken by sovereign governments. Once the light of consciousness does touch down there, what does it do? Mars may have water and other potential resources, but on top of its profound hostility to human life, the planet looks like the most charmless corner of the American Southwest, without the saving grace of being able to grab a Cherry Coke slushie from a nearby filling station.

In truth, it doesn’t really matter whether Mr. Musk’s most ambitious dreams become reality. (Except to NASA, which is counting on a perfected Starship to ferry its astronauts to the moon in 2026.) We’ve been conditioned by a century of media and storytelling to believe that the next great adventure is waiting for us in space — the frontier extended. We’ll solve our problems out there, unburdened by Earth’s gravity and the weight of thousands of years of history. We’ll make friends, we’ll learn about ourselves, we’ll get wiser and better. And if we can’t quite get there yet, we’ll eagerly wait for the day when we can.

It’s worth noting, though, that astronauts who have experienced revelatory change in space are struck not by how much is up there but by how little. The emotional impact of seeing Earth from a distance is called the “overview effect,” and while everyone experiences it differently, it often manifests as a kind of sorrow and loneliness mitigated by a feeling of community and solidarity with all that remains on Earth.

In July 2021, Jeff Bezos, a different billionaire with a private space program in a different part of Texas, experienced weightlessness, briefly, after being launched by a Blue Origin rocket. A few months later, the company launched William Shatner, the progenitor, as Captain Kirk, of several generations of adolescent space fantasies. When he landed, while Mr. Bezos grinned nearby at the success of his latest toy, Mr. Shatner wept . He was struck not by how much was “up there” but how little. “Everything I had thought was wrong,” Mr. Shatner wrote later . “The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.” He suddenly understood how fragile the home planet was, and he knew it was all we had.

If Mr. Bezos had a flash of the same insight, he didn’t show it. It must be fun to have a toy box like that — with spaceships, cities on the sea, yachts and submarines. But it comes at the cost of sight. Having stretched out their arms for glory, men like Mr. Musk can’t see that their real legacy may be, when the final accounting comes, the price others paid for them. In Brownsville, for each beneficiary of the largess, there are costs: residents displaced, workers injured, endangered animals harmed, a community disrupted.

That’s true everywhere Mr. Musk goes. Our consolation is that we can see right through him and the others. They seem to be no happier. Their preoccupations make them appear strangely small, sometimes even pitiable. Thiel, Mr. Musk’s former business partner, has spent decades and millions of dollars trying to prevent his own death. No poor man could be so foolish.

We have all been given the light of consciousness, to nurture and protect. But for all his abilities, for all his assets, Mr. Musk is stuck looking for redemption in a place that doesn’t hold it. The meaning of life isn’t on Mars, but in Brownsville. The only meaning available to us is in one another: love and friendship, truth and beauty where it can be found, the snowy plover and Noel Rangel in his bed.

Christopher Hooks is a Texas native and writer based in Austin. He is a contributing editor to Texas Monthly.

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Shatner in Space: What William Shatner Learned During His Trip to the
William Shatner floating during his Blue Origin space flight
William Shatner is about to be the oldest person ever blasted into
Documentary Review: Shatner In Space
Star Trek's William Shatner reflects on his trip to space
William Shatner's Space Flight Documented In Amazon Special

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William Shatner details historic trip to space on TODAY show
William Shatner has been beamed up. Now, he's just beaming. The actor, 90, became the oldest person to fly to space Wednesday when he flew aboard a rocket developed by Blue Origin, the private ...
William Shatner's space flight: Here's everything you need to know
Ninety-year-old William Shatner, who gained fame portraying Captain Kirk on the original "Star Trek," just hitched a ride aboard a suborbital spacecraft that grazed the edge of outer space ...
Star Trek's William Shatner blasts into space on Blue Origin rocket
Hollywood actor William Shatner has become the oldest person to go to space as he blasted off aboard the Blue Origin sub-orbital capsule. The 90-year-old, who played Captain James T Kirk in the ...
William Shatner goes to space on Blue Origin mission
12:00 p.m. ET, October 13, 2021. An emotional William Shatner says "I hope I can maintain what I feel now. I don't want to lose it." Back on Earth, William Shatner grew emotional describing his ...
Our Strange New Era of Space Travel
Koren: So I spoke with William Shatner about his space flight. He was 90 years old when he took that trip. I recorded some of my conversation with Shatner. And he said it was a really ...
International Space Development Conference 2024 beams up Star Trek's
On Friday (May 24), actor William Shatner, who originated the role of Captain James T. Kirk and launched into space on a Blue Origin rocket in 2021, will receive the Robert Heinlein Memorial Award ...
William Shatner will launch into space with Blue Origin on Oct. 12
Actor William Shatner, at left, and Blue Origin Vice President of Mission & Flight Operations, at right, will fill the final two seats on the Oct. 12, 2021, New Shepard crewed flight.
William Shatner on AI, Climate Change, His Children's Album & More
The 93-year-old icon talks music, AI, going up into space and which song he's most proud of. By Joe Lynch. 05/24/2024. William Shatner Manfred Baumann. When William Shatner released The ...
Why William Shatner Allegedly Blocked Kirstie Alley From Returning For
Space may be the final frontier in the "Star Trek" world, but apparently, earthbound grudges can still travel quite keenly through the vastness of space. ... Why William Shatner Allegedly Blocked ...
America's first Black astronaut candidate gets to space on ...
The brief flight from West Texas made Dwight the new record-holder for oldest person in space — nearly two months older than "Star Trek" actor William Shatner was when he went up in 2021.
William Shatner Among Geniuses Honored At Liberty Science ...
William Shatner beamed up into the Liberty Science Center (LSC) last night to accept the 2024 Icon Award at the sold-out 12th Annual Liberty Science Center Genius Gala. "On October 13, 2021 ...
What will it take for William Shatner to reprise 'Star Trek' role
In 2021, Shatner had a real-life "Star Trek" experience when he flew to space on Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin shuttle.. In January, it was reported that the ashes of the series' creator, Gene ...
Try Living in Elon Musk's Company Town
Try Living in Elon Musk's Company Town. Mr. Hooks is a writer based in Austin, Texas. J ust after 7 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 18, as the sun was rising in the Gulf of Mexico, Noel Rangel, a 26-year ...

William Shatner: My Trip to Space Filled Me With ‘Overwhelming Sadness’ (EXCLUSIVE)

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Star Trek's William Shatner blasts into space on Blue Origin rocket

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William Shatner goes to space on Blue Origin mission

"I’m overwhelmed," Shatner says after 11-minute trip into space

Blue Origin passengers given flight wings from Jeff Bezos

An emotional William Shatner says "I hope I can maintain what I feel now. I don't want to lose it."

William Shatner and crew emerge from Blue Origin capsule after space flight

William Shatner makes history as oldest person to go to space

Capsule carrying crew returns to Earth

Shatner tweeted an Isaac Newton quote as he arrived in space

The booster has landed

Crew will start feeling weightlessness

Our Strange New Era of Space Travel

William Shatner will launch into space with Blue Origin on Oct. 12

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