William Shatner, the iconic actor who played Captain James T. Kirk in the original Star Trek series has spent a lifetime talking about space.
As captain of the USS Enterprise, he represented the theme of exploring “strange new worlds,” seeking out “new life and new civilizations” and boldly going “where no man has gone before.”
Then Shatner was allowed to join Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin trip to space in October 2021 at age 90, and he was able to compare how his expectations met up with reality.
What Shatner had to say about his real trip into space was shocking to many. He shared an excerpt from his new book, which reveals that his initial reaction to being in space was surprisingly dark.
“I love the mystery of the universe,” Shatner wrote. “I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years…”
But now he was looking out of a real window in a real spacecraft and real outer space. He said, “there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold,” he wrote. “All I saw was death. I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing.”
Then Shatner said that he turned back toward “the light of home,” and he saw the opposite. “I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her.”
That’s when he made a shocking revelation: “Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.”
“I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film Contact,’ when Jodie Foster’s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, ‘They should’ve sent a poet.’ I had a different experience because I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.
“It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral,” Shatner wrote.
Shatner shares more of his reflections on life on this planet and beyond in his new book, “Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder.”
