In this exclusive excerpt from William Shatner's new book, "Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder," the "Star Trek" actor reflects on his voyage into space on Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin space shuttle on Oct. 13, 2021. Then 90 years old, Shatner became the oldest living person to travel into space, but as the actor and author details below, he was surprised by his own reaction to the experience.
So, I went to space.
Our group, consisting of me, tech mogul Glen de Vries, Blue Origin Vice President and former NASA International Space Station flight controller Audrey Powers, and former NASA engineer Dr. Chris Boshuizen, had done various simulations and training courses to prepare, but you can only prepare so much for a trip out of Earth's atmosphere! As if sensing that feeling in our group, the ground crew kept reassuring us along the way. "Everything's going to be fine. Don't worry about anything. It's all okay." Sure, easy for them to say, I thought. They get to stay here on the ground.
During our preparation, we had gone up eleven flights of the gantry to see what it would be like when the rocket was there. We were then escorted to a thick cement room with oxygen tanks. "What's this room for?" I asked casually.
"Oh, you guys will rush in here if the rocket explodes," a Blue Origin fellow responded just as casually.
Uh-huh. A safe room. Eleven stories up. In case the rocket explodes.
Well, at least they've thought of it.
When the day finally arrived, I couldn't get the Hindenburg out of my head. Not enough to cancel, of course---I hold myself to be a professional, and I was booked. The show had to go on.
We got ourselves situated inside the pod. You have to strap yourself in in a specific order. In the simulator, I didn't nail it every time, so as I sat there, waiting to take off, the importance of navigating weightlessness to get back and strap into the seat correctly was at the forefront of my mind.
That, and the Hindenburg crash.
Then there was a delay.
"Sorry, folks, there's a slight anomaly in the engine. It'll just be a few moments."
An anomaly in the engine?! That sounds kinda serious, doesn't it?
An anomaly is something that does not belong. What is currently in the engine that doesn't belong there?!
More importantly, why would they tell us that? There is a time for unvarnished honesty. I get that. This wasn't it.
Apparently, the anomaly wasn't too concerning, because thirty seconds later, we were cleared for launch and the countdown began. With all the attending noise, fire, and fury, we lifted off. I could see Earth disappearing. As we ascended, I was at once aware of pressure. Gravitational forces pulling at me. The g's. There was an instrument that told us how many g's we were experiencing. At two g's, I tried to raise my arm, and could barely do so. At three g's, I felt my face being pushed down into my seat. I don't know how much more of this I can take, I thought. Will I pass out? Will my face melt into a pile of mush? How many g's can my ninety-year-old body handle?
And then, suddenly, relief. No g's. Zero. Weightlessness. We were floating.
We got out of our harnesses and began to float around. The other folks went straight into somersaults and enjoying all the effects of weightlessness. I wanted no part in that. I wanted, needed to get to the window as quickly as possible to see what was out there.
I looked down and I could see the hole that our spaceship had punched in the thin, blue-tinged layer of oxygen around Earth. It was as if there was a wake trailing behind where we had just been, and just as soon as I'd noticed it, it disappeared.
I continued my self-guided tour and turned my head to face the other direction, to stare into space. I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely... all of that has thrilled me for years... but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.
Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.
I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things---that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film "Contact," when Jodie Foster's character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, "They should've sent a poet." I had a different experience, because 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. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.
I learned later that I was not alone in this feeling. It is called the "Overview Effect" and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others. Essentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet's fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner. Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: "There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity."
It can change the way we look at the planet but also other things like countries, ethnicities, religions; it can prompt an instant reevaluation of our shared harmony and a shift in focus to all the wonderful things we have in common instead of what makes us different. It reinforced tenfold my own view on the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human entanglement, and eventually, it returned a feeling of hope to my heart. In this insignificance we share, we have one gift that other species perhaps do not: we are aware---not only of our insignificance, but the grandeur around us that makes us insignificant. That allows us perhaps a chance to rededicate ourselves to our planet, to each other, to life and love all around us. If we seize that chance.
https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/william-shatner-space-boldly-go-excerpt-1235395113/
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He needs to go back on the bottle
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Whatever he's doing he is doing it right. Guy looks great for 90
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Adrenocrome
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Men who dont aggressively drink are women.
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Thats right goyim, the ball earth is real but borders aren't, the space man on TV said so!
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me trying to find the kansas-colorado borderline in the middle of the desert
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The earth needs strong borders
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The globallist jews keep getting more and more innovative with their propaganda by goyim.
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Yeah, dude, you're ninety. It's right around the corner.
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What a soyboy, I thought you were based, Will.
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WILL SHITNER
LMAO
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soyboy and based in one comment...
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I share a planet with chiobu
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Why does jinx schizo have a crush on you
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yellow fever
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Who wouldn't tbh
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Her pusy is sideways tho and probably smells like garlic
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if you aren’t shoving garlic up your bussy then you’re not keeping yourself safe enough sweaty
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If you're so worried about my safety, why don't you come over here and shove some garlic up my vagina for me? I'm sure you'll be happy to do it.
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Gross
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It's just a basic precaution of being a dramanaut, like taking your daily PrEP dose before you access this website.
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Shatner is just securing his legacy as the superior cast member of Star Trek. Everyone else is either dead or r-slurred
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Blah blah blah blah…..NOBODY CARES OLD MAN
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So he went into space and concluded what I've been saying all along:
Space is a waste of time.
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That was a good read. I didn't realize he's 90. Shit I saw that vid of him next to Bezos and him looking at Bezos like "what a douche" lol and I did not realize he's that old. He looks good for 90.
Krayon sexually assaulted his sister.
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There's a clip of him trying to tell a story to Bezos, and Bezos completely ignored him lol.
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I saw that one! lol Bezos seems like a douche but everyone kissing his butt anyway was lol
Krayon sexually assaulted his sister.
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"Coming together" with certain parts of our species is aggressively counterproductive to the goal of saving our planet.
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We have one thing, self awareness (along with some animals), which against all projected statistical odds—only this planet seems to have in at least this corner of the galaxy.
But we’re insignificant!!! (No, seriously, what’s with this pious, quasi-religious humility?)
Also, absent some strong human intervention, there’s no saving anything—not even if you ride public transportation and sort your garbage! Not even if people weren’t here and we remained monke!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
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These are assuming that people, I dunno, just hang out and don’t do anything or whatever.
But yeah, at some point all the water is going to subduct and evaporate anyway, unless we geo-engineer up a restoration—which should be perfectly doable in 2 billion years.
My point is that, without ambition and action, shit wasn’t going to last forever anyway.
There’s some issues with this theory, but I find it interesting as a concept:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point
On what the future of humans and other self-aware creatures is, or maybe everything, or many living creatures, have a degree of consciousness. Transhumanism is kinda weird, in some ways, too—nerds tend to imagine some kind of cold superintellegence, I kinda tend to think that empathy and mercy and kindness are things that became more prevalent as intelligence grew, so I don’t know why some people say that “If God DOES exist, he certainly doesn’t care about us!” If God were to be what people imagine God to be, eternal and omnipotent, God would be able to perform an unbounded series of calculations in finite time, so caring about everything and everyone would be trivial.
Regardless, the fact that anything exists at all, and that we’re here, is pretty cool IMO.
Even if you set aside the fine-tuned universe concept, and say that “we’re only here because this is the only timeline that we could exist in”—that’s cool too, that means there’s an infinite series of other things that happened. This is the area where cosmological theory and religion aren’t separated by much, because all of the many worlds shit, as cool as it is, cannot be tested—so scientifically it’s only a little more valid than Turtle Island or any other explanation.
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Good point.
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The solution is obvious: we must kill the sun.
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That's r-slurred. Just put thrusters on the Earth, and move her to a new galaxy
Don't forget to turn off signatures in settings!
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But the science men on the teevee have been telling me that Florida will be underwater in 3 years since 1982, and it has gone nowhere in two weeks at a time for 50 years lmao
Now they think they can predict how much plant food there will be in 800 million years?
R-slur
Change is the only constant you dildo
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This is nothing but quasi religious babble AAAAAHHH SAVE MEEE THE WORLD IS DOOMED AND ALSO IM 90 AND DYING AND IT SUCKS
Yeah yeah bro like houndreds of millions of years down the line there will be not a single thing AT FRICKING ALL that has changed. You know like in the past 100 where we went from horse drawn carriage to space exploration. Clearly we're just shit and doomed and c*m and piss or some shit.
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Great read
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I cried .
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Who?
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he plays wolverine in the marvel movies
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wow an actor is acting
space is fake
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No shit space isn't cgi r-slur
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Yes, science is deppressing, boring and unrewarding. What else is new.
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He's just sad cause he didn't find green space women to frick or Lizard men to fight.
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I pity anyone who doesn't get the character of Kirk and Shatner's performance of him. If you actually ever watched the show (Challenge for zoomers watch a good TV show (impossible)) you'd see that half the time he seduces the girl but doesn't frick her and ends up convincing her that democracy and the
AmericanFederation way is best. The other half she tragically dies before the episode ends. Kirk is fated to be a virgin forever because that's how episodic TV worked in the 1960s.Jump in the discussion.
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Ive seen TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT. I fricking hate JJs Star Trek movies. I was juat shitposting.
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Snapshots:
undelete.pullpush.io
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
William Shatner:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
Boldly Go:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
Star Trek:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
Blue Origin:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
oldest living person to travel into space:
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
ghostarchive.org (click to archive)
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