We finally have our first look at William Shatner's first real trip to space after decades portraying a legendary "Star Trek" captain and it looks like the view was amazing.
"Oh, wow!" Shatner says in a video released by Blue Origin, which launched the "Star Trek" actor and three others on a suborbital trip Wednesday (Oct. 13). "No description can equal this."
While the quarters of the Blue Origin's New Shepard space capsule Shatner rode to space in are not as roomy as that of the U.S.S. Enterprise he captained in fiction, a new video from spacecraft provider Blue Origin shows Shatner and his four crewmates glued to the windows during the microgravity phase of the flight.
In photos: William Shatner's space launch with Blue Origin
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Shatner chuckles repeatedly while looking at the view of Earth, while his crewmate Audrey Powers, Blue Origin's vice president of mission and flight operations, exclaims, "Holy hell!"
The crew members were able to unstrap during the apogee of the NS-18 mission's suborbital flight, which lasted just over 10 minutes. The capsule reached a maximum altitude of nearly 66 miles (106 km), 4 miles higher than the widely recognized boundary of space.
"This was the voyage of the RSS First Step today," Blue Origin wrote in a Twitter video description. "Its mission: encounter Earth from incredible views at apogee."
This was the voyage of the RSS First Step today. Its mission: encounter Earth from incredible views at apogee pic.twitter.com/Gzsnkv97K9October 13, 2021
Also on the flight were Glen de Vries, vice chair for life sciences and healthcare at the French software company Dassault Systèmes and Chris Boshuizen, co-founder of the Earth-observation company Planet.
But it was Shatner who took the lion's share of the coverage, as the fictional space captain became the oldest person in space at age 90, on only the second-ever crewed spaceflight for Blue Origin.
After the flight, he was moved to tears during a press conference as he explained his feelings upon looking out the window.
"What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine. I'm so filled with emotion about what just happened ... it's extraordinary," Shatner said, while talking to Blue Origin Jeff Bezos (who embarked on the first crewed flight on July 20).
"I hope I never recover, that I can maintain what I feel now," Shatner continued. "I don't want to lose it. It's so much larger than me and life.
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