Here’s the moment William Shatner reached space, the final frontier.
New video shows an amazed Shatner — the actor who famously played Captain Kirk in the original “Star Trek” TV series — floating inside Blue Origin’s capsule with his fellow astronauts during his brief trip to the edge of space on Wednesday morning.
The 90-year-old Shatner experienced a few minutes of weightlessness aboard the spacecraft from Jeff Bezos’ company.
“Wow,” Shatner mouthed, in footage released by Blue Origin.
Dressed in a snug royal-blue flight suit, Shatner could be seen staring out of the capsule windows, seemingly enraptured by his view of the Earth’s horizon.
He delivered a lengthy monologue about the awing experience after getting back on solid ground.
“Everybody in the world needs to do this!” a tearful Shatner told Bezos upon their return to earth while others celebrated over champagne in the background.
“The covering of blue, this blanket, this comforter of blue we have around us. We think, ‘Oh, that’s blue sky,’ and all of a sudden you shoot through it and you whip the sheet off you and you’re looking into blackness, into black nothingness.
“As you look down, there’s your blue down there with the black up there. There is Mother Earth and comfort and there is — is there death? I don’t know. Is that the way death is?” he asked.
Known for his role as the brave commander of the starship Enterprise, the Canadian actor is the oldest person to have ever traveled to space.
He and three other crewmembers took off just before 10:50 a.m. from the West Texas desert in a New Shepard rocket.
The spaceship climbed to an altitude of about 290,000 feet before the capsule separated from the booster.
The capsule climbed to an altitude of more than 351,000 feet about four minutes after launch, passing the internationally recognized boundary of space, called the Karman Line, about 62 miles above Earth.
The crew spent about three minutes in zero gravity before the capsule safely parachuted back to earth. The flight lasted just over 10 minutes.
