The Starship Enterprise never had to delay its mission to seek new life and new civilizations due to bad weather, but that is precisely what Star Trek captain William Shatner faces in his real-life attempt to become the oldest. of the world aboard Blue Origin’s suborbital spacecraft.
Blue Origin, the space company created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, says the 90-year-old actor and his three shipmates will now fly in the company’s New Shepard spacecraft on Wednesday instead of Tuesday, due to a forecast. unacceptable winds at the West Texas launch site on the originally scheduled date.
Shatner is already at Blue Origin Launch Site One after flying in from New York Comic Con. He is joined by Planet Labs co-founder Chris Boshuizen, Medidata co-founder Glen de Vries, and Audrey Powers, Blue Origin vice president of mission and flight operations for New Shepard.
Boshuizen and de Vries are paying an undisclosed fee for their trips, while Powers and Shatner are flying as special guests of Blue Origin.
According to today’s announcement, weather is the only concern for the launch.
“As part of today’s flight readiness review, the mission operations team confirmed that the vehicle has met all mission requirements and the astronauts began their training today,” Blue Origin said.
The Blue Origin flight plan calls for the quartet to launch beyond the 100-kilometer (62-mile) space limit to experience a few minutes of weightlessness and gaze down at the curved Earth through the windows of the New Shepard crew capsule. . They would then make a parachute-assisted descent while the spacecraft’s hydrogen-powered booster rocket executes its own autonomous landing.
The itinerary follows the pattern set for July’s first New Shepard manned flight, taken over by Bezos and his brother Mark, as well as Dutch student Oliver Daemen (at 18, the youngest space flyer in the world) and pioneer of Wally Funk aviation (at 82, the current record holder for oldest humans in space).
Shatner has already been making the rounds on the television interview circuit. “I’m terrified,” he said on NBC. “I am Captain Kirk and I am terrified of going into space.”
But on CNN, Shatner said he was eager to see “the majesty of space and Earth’s oasis.” He also jokingly referred to one of his best-known roles from his pre-Kirk career, as a scared airplane passenger in “The Twilight Zone.”
“I want to press my nose against the plastic window,” Shatner said. “What I don’t want to see is someone else looking at me.”
Wednesday’s launch is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. CT (6:30 a.m. PT), with streaming video coverage beginning through the Blue Origin website 90 minutes before takeoff.
