Pump The Brakes Captain Kirk... Blue Origin Delays Texas Blast Off Of History Making Space Flight
WEST TEXAS (CBSDFW.COM/CNN) — Star Trek's Captain Kirk will be on the ground in Texas for a little longer before setting out on his first voyage to explore space.
Blue Origin is delaying William Shatner's trip because of high winds. The launch was originally scheduled for October 12 from the spaceport in Van Horn, Texas. The trip is now slated to take place one day later - on October 13 - less than three months after the company's first crewed launch.
Whenever blast off happens the trip will make the 90-year-old actor the oldest person ever to travel to space.
Shatner lead the U.S.S. Enterprise on an intergalactic odyssey. Now he will get to go on his own odyssey. "Things I have only played as an actor, I am going to get to see firsthand," he said.
Blue Origin announced Shatner would be on the next flight, alongside Audrey Powers, Blue Origin's vice president of mission and flight operations; Glen de Vries, a co-founder of the medical research platform Medidata; and tech entrepreneur Chris Boshuizen.
Both Boshuizen and de Vries are paying customers on the flight -- shelling out more than $250,000 per ticket.
The crew will enjoy about 4-minutes of weightlessness during an 11-minute suborbital trip to space. "I go to the edge of space and loosen the restraints around me and be weightless and looking into the vastness of the universe," Shatner said.
CBS' Stephen Colbert, host of The Late Show, made a joke about the mission tweeting --
"I hope William Shatner doesn't have unrealistic expectations of what space is like."
Liftoff for the upcoming Blue Origin flight will be at 7:30 a.m. CST.
(© Copyright 2021 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. The CNN Wire™ & © 2021 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company contributed to this report.)
