William Shatner Admits He’s “Scared” to Go Into Space
Captain Kirk is freaking out.
As William Shatner prepares to face the Final Frontier, he admitted that he’s pretty nervous to boldly go where very few men have gone before.
During a panel at the New York Comic-Con this week, the man best known for playing USS Enterprise Captain James Tiberius Kirk opened up about his nervousness about heading to space this week.
“I’m Captain Kirk and I’m scared,” Shatner told the crowd (his answer starts at about the 31-minute mark in the video).
The nervousness Shatner feels is completely understandable, as it’s not exactly a secret that there are incredible risks that come with space travel, including death. The good news is that the journey is relatively brief and Blue Origin’s flights have been completely successful up to this point.
Shatner was originally supposed to head up tomorrow but the voyage has been delayed a day due to weather, with Blue Origin announcing in a statement that the launch from the spaceport in Van Horn, Texas, will now take place at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday instead. Once the 90-year-old makes the journey, he will officially become the oldest person ever to travel to space, so maybe he’ll be getting a senior discount on whatever tubed food they’re offering on the journey.
But it’s not just fear that Shatner is feeling about his upcoming space excursion, he’s also feeling major excitement about the prospect of life imitating art when the most legendary fictional space explorer ever gets to actually take a journey to the cosmos.
“I’m going to see the vastness of space and the extraordinary miracle of our Earth and how fragile it is compared to the forces at work in the universe — that’s really what I’m looking for,” Shatner told NBC’s TODAY show last week.
In the words of Shatner’s late costar and first officer Leonard Nimoy, live long and prosper, Captain Kirk.
