Billionaire U.S. businessman Jeff Bezos's company Blue Origin is set for its second suborbital tourism flight on Wednesday, with actor William Shatner - who embodied the promise of space travel on the "Star Trek" TV series and films - among the four-person all-civilian crew poised to blast off in Texas.
Shatner, at age 90, is due to become the oldest person ever in space. He and his crewmates are scheduled for a 9:30 a.m. (1030 EDT/1430 GMT) takeoff aboard the white 60-foot-tall (18.3 meters-tall) fully autonomous New Shepard spacecraft at Blue Origin's launch site about 20 miles (32 km) outside the rural west Texas town of Van Horn.
The four astronauts, all wearing blue flight suits with the company's name in white letters on one sleeve, climbed into the crew capsule atop the spacecraft and strapped in after ascending a set of stairs accompanied by Bezos. Each rang a bell before entering the capsule. Before that, they rode a vehicle with Bezos at the wheel to the launch pad after about a half hour delay.
Winds were light and skies were clear ahead of launch time.
Joining Shatner for what the company said is expected to be a roughly 11-minute journey are former NASA engineer Chris Boshuizen, clinical research entrepreneur Glen de Vries and Blue Origin vice president and engineer Audrey Powers https://www.blueorigin.com/news/shatner-powers-announced-ns18.
Blue Origin said the astronauts will experience about three to four minutes of weightlessness and travel above the internationally recognized boundary of space known as the Karman Line, about 62 miles (100 km) above Earth. The crew capsule is due to return to the Texas desert under parachutes.
The flight, previously scheduled for Tuesday, was pushed back a day for wind-related reasons https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/science/winds-delay-blue-origins-space-launch-with-shatner-2021-10-10.
The four crew members went through training on Tuesday and the mission team completed a flight-readiness evaluation to ensure "all systems are go for launch," Blue Origin said on Twitter.
Blue Origin had a successful debut space tourism flight on July 20, with Bezos and three others aboard, flying to the edge of space and back on a trip lasting 10 minutes and 10 seconds. On that flight, pioneering female aviator Wally Funk https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/pioneering-female-aviator-wally-funk-is-americas-new-sweetheart-2021-07-20 at age 82 became the oldest person to reach space.
Shatner, who turned 90 in March, has been acting since the 1950s and remains busy with entertainment projects and fan conventions. He is best known for starring as Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise on the classic 1960s TV series "Star Trek" and seven subsequent films about fictional adventures in outer space.
As an actor, Shatner was synonymous with space voyages. During the opening credits of each episode of the series, he called space "the final frontier" and promised "to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."— Reuters
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