William Shatner may have gone where no man has gone before as Captain Kirk in Star Trek, but in real life, he came quite close. Shatner became the oldest man to travel to space back in 2021 (until 2024) when he joined three others as a space tourist in Blue Origin’s NS-18 spacecraft. The actor reportedly did not pay for the trip.
Blue Origin’s recent spaceflight with the all-female crew of Katy Perry, Gayle King, and Lauren Sánchez, among others, was widely criticized due to the post-trip statements from the crew and the positioning of the trip as a win for feminism. However, Shatner’s trip was received differently as he seemingly experienced the ‘overview effect’.
William Shatner went to space on Blue Origin before Katy Perry and the NS-31 gang
Boy, last week was probably a more entertaining ride than Blue Origin’s NS-31. The eleven minutes of spaceflight sparked so many conversations and memes that it might just become a pivotal pop culture moment. The NS-31 flight from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin featured an all-female crew of six, which the PR teams never stopped highlighting (via BBC).
The flight itself was already criticized as the vanity project from Bezos seemed to be tone deaf to the environmental concerns of the planet. However, what made the Internet lose its mind was participants Katy Perry and Galye King’s reaction post-trip, which included the pop star kissing the ground and the CBS host asking regular people if they had been to space.
However, King and Perry (along with producer Kerianne Flynn, civil rights activist Amanda Nguyen, aerospace engineer Aisha Bowe, and journalist and Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sánchez) were not the only celebrities to make the Blue Origin flight. Way back in 2021, Star Trek’s William Shatner fulfilled his Captain Kirk dreams by going on board the NS-18.
Shatner, at the time, became the oldest man to go into space, at the age of 90. He reportedly did not pay for the trip and was a tourist, along with Blue Origin VP Audrey Powers, Australian musician Chris Boshuizen, and late entrepreneur Glen de Vries. It was the company’s second human flight after the first one carried Bezos himself (via WSJ).
William Shatner experienced the ‘overview effect’ while in space
One of the most quoted moments from Katy Perry’s flight to space aboard the NS-31 was her ‘connected to love’ statement after she disembarked from the space shuttle. Many criticized her statements about love and humanity after traveling all the way to space, spending millions of dollars, and generating carbon emissions worth generations.
However, William Shatner seemed to have a different yet familiar experience when he crossed the Kármán line. The Star Trek actor reportedly experienced the ‘overview effect’, which is a cognitive shift that many astronauts experienced after looking at Earth from space. Shatner described his feelings in his memoir (via Variety),
I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound. It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness.
Shatner mentioned that he began to feel grief about the destruction happening on Earth as he floated around in space. He said that the trip, which should have felt like a celebration, felt more like a funeral.
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