Moments after William Shatner touched down to Earth after becoming the oldest human being to ever travel to space, he was overwhelmed.
Shatner recounted his feelings to Blue Origin CEO Jeff Bezos about what he’d seen, and what he was feeling, particularly the “fragility” of our planet’s blue sky.
“You shoot through it all of a sudden, as if you whip…a sheet off you when you’re asleep, and you’re looking into blackness, into black ugliness,” the Star Trek star recalled, clearly overcome.
Continuing to try to explain the experience, he said, “You look down and there’s the blue down there and the black up there…[Down] there is Mother Earth and comfort, and [up] there is death? I don’t know, is that death? Is that the way death is? Whup! and it’s gone? Jesus.”
Shatner wiped away tears while he kept on speaking with Bezos, as crew members scurried around the New Shepard capsule that the actor had just exited.
“What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine. It’s so filled with emotion about what just happened. I just it’s extraordinary, extraordinary,” Shatner said to Bezos.
“I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it,” Shatner added, before the two men embraced.
Bezos called Shatner’s words “beautiful.”
The Star Trek actor, famous for playing Starship Enterprise Captain James T. Kirk, blasted off into space at 10:50 a.m. Eastern time, along with microbiologist Glen de Vries, Planet Labs founder Chris Boshuizen and Blue Origin’s Audrey Powers.
Minutes after their launch, their capsule landed flawlessly on the Texas desert.
Copyright © 2021, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
