Captain Kirk, Boldly To Go Where Few Men Have Gone Before

Space Tourism’s Most Famous Guest

While it won’t be aboard the famed U.S.S. Enterprise bearing the NCC-1701 tag, and he won’t be sitting in the captain’s chair with his good buddies Spock and McCoy at his side, William Shatner is going to space. Continuing with the decades-long tradition of the wealthy, famous, or well-connected making the journey where hundreds have gone before Star Trek’s Captain Kirk is scheduled to launch this Wednesday.

Actor William Shatner is scheduled to take off on a quick trip to the edge of space and back, riding in the Blue Origin capsule, the space company founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. While space is opening up for people with deep pockets, the final frontier is still something most ordinary folks will only reach with luck or the blessing of a contest win.

Shatner, who is 90 years old, will be the oldest person to reach space and has said to the press he feels “terrified.” Reportedly, Shatner is going along for the ride as a guest, rather than a paying customer.

While polls show that people feel positive about space travel’s potential effect on humanity, Shatner’s going along on a flight is a classic marketing event. William Shatner did, after all, make his claim to fame and fortune on traveling through space. So, while at 90 years old it’s likely to be a one-time thing, it’s certain to create the kind of buzz, interest, and trends on the internet that will bring Bezos’s space company the attention they desire.

Polls show that more than half of people asked, believe the recent celebrity, civilian flights, mean that one day soon, ordinary people will be able to get to outer space. It’s long been the promise that space travel and science fiction gave to us all. Shows like Star Trek, movies like Star Wars, both have one thing in common. Being in space was less like the early days of space exploration, requiring everyone to have the right stuff, and that someday space vehicles would be more like flying the airlines.

While I, and millions of his adoring fans, wish him safe travels as he gets to see the vastness of space and the miracle of our Earth, there’s a history that I won’t forget. I remember it well, sitting in 8th-grade science when the shuttle carrying the first teacher to space launched. That flight, the famed Challenger launch, ended abruptly in tragedy when the shuttle exploded before our eyes. And while there’s been only one other horrendous accident in my lifetime, one has to wonder, as we seemingly rush back into the heavens, will it happen again?

Not Just The Business Of Tourism

The rush to space will fill the hearts and minds of adventurers, entrepreneurs, sci-fi enthusiasts, and world leaders looking for control of what it has to offer. At the brink of the new era in space exploration, at a time when we are just coming to the realities of global expansionism, what are the non-monetary costs of this inevitable space rush. Distant worlds in the solar system are enticing to developers with promises of worlds rich in minerals and ores. An entire industry has begun to spring up with the concern of how to harvest an abundance of resources stored off-Earth. The new rules of this new age are still quite vague, to say the least.

While Shatner may be the oldest person to reach space, there are many other avenues of space that hold promise. Long-range space exploration, once we’ve conquered this galaxy, and reaped its’ unknown benefits, will be right around the corner, just past the star Antares, and on the left. What might we find when we’re invested in science and exploration? Hopefully, that we’re capable of a world much like the one Jim Kirk knows. We are, after all, a tiny speck in a vast galaxy of stars. Maybe one day, this new space race will show us here on earth that our differences, while many, are minuscule and inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.