Jeff Bezos’ space travel company Blue Origin on Monday announced that legendary actor William Shatner will be flying to outer space on October 12, thus making him the oldest person to do so. The 90-year-old film star will be accompanied by Audrey Powers, Blue Origin’s Vice President of Mission & Flight Operations on the New Shepard NS-18, along with crewmates Chris Boshuizen and Glen de Vries. The flight will lift off from Launch Site One in Texas.
“I’ve heard about space for a long time now. I’m taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle,” said Shatner, who has long wanted to travel to space and will now see his dream turn into reality.
“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,” said Powers.
As a guidance and controls engineer, Powers was a flight controller for NASA with 2,000 hours of console time in Mission Control for the International Space Station Program. In addition to serving as executive sponsor of Blue Origin’s New Mercury gender diversity business resource group, she is a pilot and serves as the Chair of the Board of Directors of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation. “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,” she added.
In a career spanning over six decades, Shatner is credited as an actor, director, producer, writer and recording artist. He is most popular for his iconic role in the 1966 Sci-Fi television series Star Trek where he played the role of Captain James T Kirk. In the series, Kirk was the commander of the USS Enterprise which was on a five-year mission “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before”. Even in real life, he will be going where no man of his age has ever gone. He is currently serving as the host and executive producer of The UnXplained on The History Channel, a non-fiction series that explores the world’s most fascinating, strange and inexplicable mysteries.
