“Captain’s log, stardate -301219.69, ie October 13, 2021, mission name: ‘Ns-18’. Sold out i high altitude winds that forced the launch to be postponed beyond 24 hours, today, when it was 16:50 in Italy, I, Captain James Tiberius Kirk, went back to space. This time, however, I really did it ”.
Could he write this, in his legendary log book, William Shatner, the Canadian actor who, at the age of 90 (last March 22), re-entered history by leaving the atmosphere. In this case he did not do it in the shoes that made him eternal as star of Star Trek (the classic series and the first six motion pictures), but becoming the oldest person ever flown over the Kármán line, where by convention the sky borders the universe.
“I’ve heard about space for a long time,” he said in an official statement on October 4, “now I’m taking the opportunity to see it in person.” Not even the visionary imagination of Gene Roddenberry, the author of Star Trek, would have dared so much. And instead mission accomplished, captain, although not thanks to the Uss Enterprise: in fact, it was Blue Origin’s “New Shepard” suborbital system that took the Shatner atmosphere beyond, Jeff Bezos’ space company.
The portrait
Between Gundam and extraterrestrial capitalism: who is Jeff Bezos and why he flies into space
by Emilio Cozzi
Slightly late on the launch floor – due to an unexplained “hold” 41 minutes before the start – Shatner has reached 107 kilometers of altitude, floated for four minutes in microgravity conditions and then plunged back into the atmosphere – the flight, in fact, was suborbital – to land ten minutes after the lift-off rocked by the three parachutes of his space lifeboat. With him, instead of the trusty Spock, were Audrey Powers, vice president of missions and flight operations at Blue Origin, Chris Boshuizen, co-founder of the satellite company Planet Labs, and Glen de Vries, co-founder of the software house Medidata.
Blue Origin
Because the Bezos rocket has the shape it has, well explained
by Emanuele Capone
With more than 200 television shows in his sixty-year career (after Star Trek there were also successful roles in TJ Hooker, The Practice and Boston Legal), almost daily horse races and 18,000 and 600 hours of flying as a pilot, However, Shatner said he was intimidated by the idea of reaching space: “I know,” he commented in a speech at Comic Con in New York a few days before the launch, “I’m the damned Captain Kirk and I’m terrified.” A paradox resolved with a “nominal” mission, as they say in the jargon, that is, it went exactly as planned.
Started off the Blue Origin ramp in Van Horn, West Texas, the Ns-18 arrived less than three months after the Bezos-based company’s First Human Flight, who last July 20 had taken the patron beyond the atmosphere together with his brother Mark, with the 18-year-old Oliver Daemen and with Wally Funk, the legendary 82-year-old aviator who belonged to the “Mercury 13”, the women secretly trained to go to the Moon, but never considered by NASA to do so.
The launch of Shatner, a great lover of space (the real one) and over the years also a collaborator of NASA in the creation of popular videos, helps to keep the enthusiasm for “space tourism” burning, actually demonstrating how the definition does not exhaust the much wider scope of commercial exploitation of the orbits closest to the Earth.
An effective communication ploy, Captain Kirk’s mission is not just a tribute to the science fiction imagery with which the United States has forged more than a generation of technicians, engineers or simple enthusiasts. It is the best publicity that Bezos can do to his will to translate the fantastic into reality, as well as a sensational commercial about the collections evoked, if not promised, by the economy of the new way of approaching space – the so-called new space economy -, that convergence between traditional industry, cost reduction and proliferation of services of which companies such as Blue Origin , SpaceX or Virgin Galactic represent the private vanguard.
SpaceX
Because Inspiration4 by Elon Musk is not a habit of space billionaires
by Emilio Cozzi
Seen in this way, the transformation of an orbital or suborbital flight into a spectacle is but one of the infinite applications of the new extra-atmospheric economy. And it is no coincidence that a week ahead of Captain Kirk, the first actress to fly into space was Russian actress Yulia Peresild, went with director Klim Shipenko even to the International Space Station (where he will remain until October 17) to shoot the first action movie in microgravity. Title of the work? The Challenge, the challenge: it is quite explicit, if you consider that the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, stands out among the producers, as if to reiterate how much the space race is played today with different but no less ambitious cards than in the 60s.
Missions of this type are not only the sign of a new relationship between the film industry and space activities, they are the most striking demonstration of how the space is being revolutionized in terms of technologies used, economic dynamics, objectives and players.
So much so that, according to unofficial rumors, Shatner would have taken a seat on the New Shepard without paying “the ticket”, but only by triggering a competition between broadcasters to grab the rights to a documentary about his business.
Does this mean that from now on you will fly beyond the atmosphere to make films or documentaries? Were they limited to this, the (economic) horizons of space would be small and so would the ambitions of the space billionaires. Rather, it means that we are only at the beginning.
Because space is the last frontier. Business too, dear Captain Kirk.
.