Captain Kirk, the role I had played in the original Star Trek series of the 1960s and, later, on the big screen, was a space hero. But I was a real 90-year-old who relied on Medicare – America’s health care system for the elderly and poor. “Bill,” said a friend on TV, “they’re going to send civilians into space. Bezos is going himself and will be looking for others to take with him. Wouldn’t it be great if Captain Kirk went up there?’ “I don’t think so,” I replied. “I don’t need to go into space. Besides, who the hell would be interested in an actor going up there?’ I remember my reaction when I was first presented with the opportunity to go into space. I said no.’ I dismissed it not for lack of curiosity or because I was afraid. Well, I was afraid, but that wasn’t my primary reason. I turned it down because I’m an actor, not an astronaut. Just a few years ago, he invited me to the headquarters of Blue Origin, his space tourism project, in Seattle, and it was immediately clear that he was a huge Star Trek fan. I was surprised to see that the lobby centerpiece was a replica of the Starship Enterprise. He told me that he had grown up watching Star Trek and talked about the power that the depiction of an optimistic future had on him as a child. We hit it right away. At that first meeting I learned that there was real enthusiasm for the idea of sending the world’s most famous space captain into space – for real. And at the end of it, I was excited at the prospect of being on the first civilian trip into space, a trip in a rocket-powered spacecraft that would take me 66 miles above the Earth’s surface, through its atmosphere and its gravitational attraction. Long enough and high enough for weightlessness. To date, there have been six manned Blue Origin flights carrying celebrities or those rich enough to spend up to £24m on a ticket. But then, they were still figuring out when they were going to get on the first flight, so they said they’d get back to us. Then in 2020, Covid struck. Everything was delayed. More than a year passed, things changed and it turned out that I had not been chosen after all. There would be a second flight in a few months. Would I consider that? I said no. It was like inviting the vice president to speak after he missed the chance to get the president. But a few weeks later, I found myself looking up at the evening sky. When the day finally arrived, October 13, 2021, I couldn’t get the doomed Hindenburg airship out of my mind. Our liftoff was to be from Launch Site One, a spaceport in Van Horn, West Texas, near the Mexican border. It was an unusually clear night, and I could actually see the stars, shining in their distorted glory as their light reached me in Los Angeles. I thought about what it might mean to go into space, to slip the bonds of Earth. The wonder of it overcame me – then the emotion. Being weightless. Looking out at the heavens. Going where no one has gone before. (Well, where some have gone before, I guess…) I also thought about the risks. Space disasters flooded my mind. The catastrophic explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986. the damaged wing of the space shuttle Columbia that caused it to break up on re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere in 2003. There have been other accidents, large and small, most often caused by simple human error. I thought long and hard about whether I really wanted to do this. Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that the feeling of excitement outweighed the fear. And so I found myself back at Blue Origin to complete two days of training in order to comply with Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations. (By comparison, a typical NASA astronaut must undergo two years of training before being certified for spaceflight.) Fortunately, the New Shepard spacecraft that was supposed to carry us into space is fully automated – there is no pilot on board and no flight controls. So I didn’t expect to throw the thing away. As part of the preparation, we were given 11 flights of the launch frame. We were then escorted into a chamber built of thick concrete with oxygen tanks inside. “What is this room?” I asked casually. “Oh, you guys will rush here if the rocket explodes,” a Blue Origin friend replied just as flippantly. AHA. A safe room. Eleven floors up. In case the missile explodes. Well, at least they’ve thought about it. Our training continued. “In the event of a problem with the missile, the pod is equipped to eject and shoot you at a safe distance, where you’ll float by parachute…” Must there be a problem with the rocket? This is like being on an airplane and being told that in the event of a water landing, your seat can be used as a flotation device. With the exception of the Miracle on the Hudson, when an airliner landed safely in the Hudson River in 2009, there are few water landings to speak of. Most involve the plane hitting the water at a billion miles an hour and exploding on impact. But in case you do land successfully on water, they’ve got you covered with floating airplane seats. When the day finally arrived, October 13, 2021, I couldn’t get the doomed Hindenburg airship out of my mind. Our liftoff was to be from Launch Site One, a spaceport in the West Texas town of Van Horn, near the Mexican border. I was so completely unprepared for this experience that I was overcome with the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm care of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness Sensing the nervousness in our group, the ground crew put us at ease along the way. ‘Everything will be fine. Do not you worry about a thing. Everything is alright “. Sure, I thought, easy for them to say. We climbed those 11 stairs to the top of the frame again, breathless at every stop, and entered our special pod, reclining in its reclining seats. Most of the training we had done was all about how to get back into those positions for the return trip after going weightless and getting out of them. If you are not strapped in properly, you risk breaking your back. You have to strap in a certain order: left shoulder, right shoulder, waist, crotch, and by the time you get to the last few straps, you’re lying down and can’t really see where the straps are supposed to go. I didn’t nail it every time in practice, so as I sat there, waiting to take off, the seat belts were at the forefront of my mind. As was the disastrous Hindenburg fireball in New Jersey in 1937. Then there was a delay. “Sorry guys, there’s a slight engine glitch. It will only be a few moments,” said a voice. Engine fault? Sounds serious, doesn’t it? More importantly, why would they tell us this? There is a time for uncertain honesty, and this was not it. Apparently, the anomaly wasn’t too alarming, because 30 seconds later, we were given the go-ahead to launch. The countdown has begun. Then with noise and fire and fury we rose and I could see the Earth disappearing. As we climbed, I immediately became aware of the pressure. Gravitational forces – the Gs – are pulling me. There was an instrument that told us how much we were experiencing. At two C’s, I tried to raise my arm and barely made it. At three C’s, I felt my face pushed right back into my head and into the seat back. I don’t know how much more of this I can take, I thought. I will faint; Will my face melt into a pile of mush? How many Gs can my 90 year old body handle? And then, suddenly… relief. No sir. Zero. lack of gravity. We were floating. Traveling at 2,233 miles per hour, we had passed the Karman line, the point 62 miles into the air that separates Earth’s atmosphere from space. We got out of our harnesses and started floating. The other people went straight to somersaults and enjoyed all the effects of weightlessness. But I wanted no part of it. I wanted, I had to, to get to the window as quickly as possible, to see what was out there. I put my face to the glass and looked where we were coming from. I could see the hole our spacecraft had made in the thin layer of blue-tinged oxygen around the Earth. And as soon as I noticed it, it was gone. I turned my head in the other direction, to look into the void. What I saw was a cold, dark, black void. Inside, it reinforced tenfold my own view of the power of our beautiful, mysterious collective human involvement. Bezos came by with a camera crew and interviewed me. I must have sounded stupid as I tried to process what I was feeling. I told him, “I hope I never recover from this.” It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, comprehensive. I turned back towards the light of the house. I could see the curvature of the Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurture, preserve, live. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I left her. Everything I expected to see and think and feel had been proven wrong. I thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis, that connection I was looking for among all living things – that being up there would be the next beautiful step in understanding the harmony of the universe. In the movie Contact, when Jodie Foster’s character goes into space and looks up at the heavens, she whispers in surprise, “They should have sent a poet.” I had a different experience, because I discovered that beauty is not out there, it is under…
