William Shatner Decries Narrative of His Space Trip: ‘I Don’t Want to be Known as the Oldest Guy … I’m Bloody Captain Kirk!’
William Shatner addressed his upcoming trip to outer space while speaking at New York Comic Con on Thursday night.
Shatner, who portrayed Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek series, told the crowd that he had the idea to go to outer space after his friend and producer Jason Ehrlich suggested it about a year and a half ago.
“Jason, for God sakes, nobody cares about Captain Kirk going up into space — it was 55 years ago — my God man — I’m doing um, hum, uh — well maybe I should go up into space,” Shatner recalled the conversation going, joking that he didn’t have much going on at the time.
He admitted to hoping he would be on the first Blue Origin flight with Jeff Bezos, but “all of a sudden” Bezos announced that he and his brother would be going on the first rocket.
“Then there was an old lady with them, and then there was a young lady,” he said as the crowd laughed. “So finally they came to me on the second thing, and they said, ‘Alright, how would you like to go up? You’ll be the oldest guy in space.'”
“I don’t want to be known as the oldest guy who went to space — I’m bloody Captain Kirk, for God’s sake!” Shatner, 90, exclaimed to a cheering crowd.
The actor went on to share that he visited the Blue Origin launch site in Texas last week, calling the scenery “mind-numbingly endless.”
“You drive 100 miles and then you get to a little town called Van Horn, and then you turn left. And you drive another 50 miles,” he added.
Shatner later joked that the Blue Origin staff often used the phrase “it’s our best guess that …”
“Your best guess!?” Shatner decried, pointing to problems with the Hubble Space Telescope and the explosion of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger.
“We’re human beings, we make mistakes,” he said. “I’m thinking, I’m going up in a rocket and our best guess is it should be fine. So there is a little niggling fire of terror. I’m terrified. I’m Captain Kirk and I’m terrified!”
The actor went on to reference another one of his roles — the concerned passenger in the Twilight Zone’s iconic 1963 episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.”
“Three minutes in the weightlessness of space, and the beauty of this oasis of Earth, and — I was planning on pressing my nose against the window, you know, and my only hope was I wouldn’t see somebody else looking back,” he cracked, sharing that his daughters would make him recreate scenes from the episode whenever they were on a plane.
In terms of his first words in space? Shatner’s not entirely sure yet.
“What can I say that is different,” he rhetorically asked. “I’ll try and think of something to suggest how deeply I feel about the experience of looking into the limitless distance.”
Watch above, via YouTube.
