Captain Kirk may be aboard next Blue Origin flight
Category: News & Politics
Via: john-russell • 3 years ago • 20 commentsBy: Agence France-Presse (Raw Story - Celebrating Years of Independent Journalism)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
William Shatner (Screen Grab)
Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, announced plans on Monday for its next flight and the news and entertainment website TMZ said it may include a celebrity astronaut -- William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk on "Star Trek."
TMZ reported that the 90-year-old Shatner would be on the October 12 voyage, making him the oldest person ever to go to space.
Blue Origin revealed the names of two members of the four-person crew but did not confirm that Shatner would be on the flight.
It said Chris Boshuizen, a former NASA engineer and co-founder of Planet Labs, and Glen de Vries, a co-founder of clinical research platform Medidata Solutions, would be on the rocket and the names of the two other astronauts will be revealed "in the coming days."
Blue Origin said the New Shepard rocket would blast off from the company's launch site in west Texas at 8:30 am Central time (1330 GMT) on October 12.
Bezos, the world's wealthiest man, his brother Mark, aviation pioneer Wally Funk, and paying customer, Oliver Daemen, flew into space on Blue Origin's first crewed flight on July 20.
Funk, at 82, and Daemen, 18, were the oldest and youngest persons ever to go into space.
The 10-minute trip took them beyond the Karman line -- the internationally recognized boundary marking the start of space -- and back again to Earth.
The October 12 flight will replicate that trip.
Blue Origin quoted Boshuizen as saying that the upcoming flight would be the "fulfillment of my greatest childhood dream."
De Vries, a vice chair at Dassault Systemes, which acquired Medidata in 2019, said the trip "is truly a dream come true."
Blue Origin's first crewed flight came just days after one by Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson, who crossed the final frontier on July 11, narrowly beating the Amazon magnate in their space battle of the billionaires.
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Beam him up !
And keep him in the pattern buffer!
Say it's not so Ed!
He better hope that there isn't a weight limit.
Make sure he wears his gold shirt and not a red one
And watch out for temporal anomalies (ST: Generations reference)
Wow, 90 years old.
He looks great . . . for 90. This will be great as long as he doesn’t have a stroke or something.
I saw him just a couple years ago at a screening of Star Trek II. We watched the movie and then he did a kind of interview for about an hour. He was totally sharp - quick witted, well spoken, and funny. It was a great time. So assuming his body is up to the task, this could be fun.
I met him about 15 years ago and he was a total jerk.
That's what most of the cast of the original Star Trek said too.
Never tire of Trek. Thanks to BBC America and my DVR, have been able to download the entire series' of ST-TNG, DS-9, Voyager, and all the feature films. Here's a site I came across awhile ago
Capt Kirk is 90. makes me fell old. Watched Star Trek when I was grade school
lol
I watched him on "Better Late than Never" and I laughed my head off. Watching Shatner, Henry Winkler, George Foreman, and Terry Bradshaw cavort around Asia was a hoot. I hope I can do half of what he does at his age when I get there.
That was good. Good times.
He's still a jerk compared to the other three
who are almost saints at least by comparison.
Maybe in comparison he was a jerk, but he has at least ONE good quality, he's a Canadian.
Remember when he was on the Twilight Zone before that? A little trivia: 2 of Shatner's daughters were in the ST: TOS episode "Miri," playing one of the Only children.
So Kirk will finally get to enter The Final Frontier, without Mr.Sulu to get him there. Actually, I kind of like that he will get that experience.
That was good. Good times.
He's still a jerk compared to the other three
who are almost saints at least by comparison.