How William Shatner Turned a Flight of Fancy Into a Lyrical Pitch For the Planet

A version of this article also appeared in the It’s Not Just You newsletter. Sign up here to get a new edition delivered to your inbox from Susanna Schrobsdorff every weekend. “I was moved to tears by what I saw, and I come back filled with…overwhelmed by sadness and empathy for this beautiful thing we call Earth.” —Actor William Shatner upon returning safely home from his brief trip into space aboard a Blue Origin rocket on October 13th. When William Shatner, the man who played the legendary Captain James T. Kirk on “Star Trek,” clambered out of a rocket capsule and into the west Texas desert, he was embraced by Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin’s founder and one of the richest men on this planet. Getting Captain Kirk to fly Blue Origin was quite a P.R. coup for Bezos’ private spaceflight company in what has become a space tourism race amongst billionaires. But perhaps not in the way that Bezos might have imagined. From the moment he stepped off the landing pad, and on every news show after that, Shatner spoke poetically and with Kirkian emotion about his ten-minute trip to the edge of space and how he saw death out there in the endless dark. He said seeing the Earth at that distance evoked a deep sense of mortality—not just his own as a 90-year-old man, but in the threat to Earth as we continue to pollute the thin blue atmosphere that makes life possible down here. Leaning into Bezos, with tears in his eyes, Shatner describ...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news