The Truth About William Shatner's Trip To Space

It's an exciting time to be alive for wannabe astronauts who don't have the time, energy, or MENSA-level IQ score to go through a whole NASA training process. These days, even regular Joes like us are getting launched into space. And sure, we wouldn't exactly call William Shatner a "normie" per se, but we still don't think acting in "Star Trek" is the same as astronaut training. And yet, Captain Kirk really did get to go to space — for real this time.

Following in the footsteps of billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, the accomplished actor became one of the first civilians to travel outside the Earth's atmosphere. If you're wondering how (and why), the legendary TV spaceship captain decided to take a jaunt into the actual solar system, well, so are we. Read on to learn the whole story of how Shatner made history, per The New York Times, by becoming the oldest person ever to go to space.

On October 13, William Shatner and three others boarded Jeff Bezos' space capsule, called Blue Origin, and were rocketed into space for a few minutes before descending back to Texas, per Axios. This is the same space shuttle that Bezos himself took on his maiden space voyage. Shatner was in awe upon landing back on Earth. "I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now. I don't want to lose it. It's so much larger than me and life," Shatner said, per the outlet. We can only imagine.

Later on Twitter, Captain Kirk wrote (rather poetically), "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, diverting myself in now & then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Let's be real, sending Shatner of all people into space for Blue Origin's second civilian trip was probably mostly branding — especially since the trip into space came as Blue Origin's workplace culture was being scrutinized, per Axios. "William Shatner makes sense in that here's a celebrity that made their claim to fame on traveling in space," a public relations and marketing professor, Jacob Czabovsky, told NPR. "It's like a one-time, kind of kitschy branding opportunity." Regardless, it's clear that Shatner's life has been made.