William Shatner to launch on Blue Origin’s New Shepard
Captain Kirk is headed to space.
William Shatner, the 90-year-old actor who starred as Captain Kirk on “Star Trek: The Original Series,” will launch on a suborbital spaceflight aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft on Oct. 12, 2021, the company announced today (Oct. 4).Â
Shatner, whose flight was hinted at last month by TMZ, is officially launching on Blue Origin‘s second crewed spaceflight. Liftoff is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. EDT (1330 GMT) from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas near the town of Van Horn. He will become the oldest person ever to fly in space with the mission.
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Joining Shatner on New Shepard will be: Audrey Powers, Blue Origin’s vice president of missions and flight operations; 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. Shatner and Powers were announced as crewmembers today, while Boshuizen and de Vries were announced on Sept. 27.
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The upcoming flight comes less than three months after Blue Origin’s First Human Flight mission, which launched Jeff Bezos, his brother Mark, 82-year-old Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen on a suborbital flight on July 20. That mission set four Guinness World Records for the oldest person to fly in space (Funk), the youngest person to fly in space (Daemen), the first siblings to launch into space together and the first paying passenger to launch into space (Daemen, whose father paid for the trip), according to a GWR statement on Friday (Oct. 1).Â
Shatner’s flight follows the 55th anniversary of “Star Trek,” which debuted on TV on Sept. 8, 1966, and on the heels of the actor’s latest album “Bill,” an autobiographical collection of spoken word pieces.
My album “BILL†is available now! 🙌🏻 Not only is this entire album important to me but “Black Horse†🐎 is quite significant. It’s a story of my love for horses, my relationship with my champion, and how his life affected me. Check out https://t.co/G48EJazvqK pic.twitter.com/iujVSqRFVFSeptember 24, 2021
We’ll be posting updates of Shatner’s launch into space, landing and post-flight celebrations here throughout the mission, so be sure to check back for updates. In the meantime, here’s a recap of Blue Origin’s First Human Flight mission.
