As U.S. billionaire businessman Jeff Bezos’s company carried out its second tourist flight to Space , Actor William Shatner soared aboard a Blue Origin rocket on a suborbital trip and landed in the Texas desert on Wednesday to become at age 90 the oldest person ever in space .
The “Star Trek” hero and three fellow passengers soared to an estimated 66 miles over the West Texas desert in the fully automated capsule and then safely parachuted to the desert floor in a flight that lasted just over 10 minutes.
Sci-fi fans reveled in the opportunity to see the man best known as the stalwart Capt James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise boldly go where no star of American TV has gone before. Shatner said ahead of the countdown that he planned to spend his approximately three minutes of weightlessness gazing down at Earth .
The four astronauts experienced about three to four minutes of weightlessness and traveled above the internationally recognized boundary of space known as the Karman Line, about 62 miles (100 km) above Earth . It marked the second space tourism flight for Blue Origin, billionaire U.S. businessman Jeff Bezos’s company founded two decades ago.
Blue Origin had a successful debut space tourism flight on July 20, with Bezos and three others aboard, flying to the edge of space and back on a trip lasting 10 minutes and 10 seconds.
“Having played the role of Captain Kirk assigns me the knowledge that a futuristic astronaut would have, but I’ve always been consumed with curiosity,” Shatner said in an interview .
