This week, 60 years after President John F. Kennedy launched the race to the moon — and formally initiated the advent of the space age — William Shatner, at the grand old age of 90, made his own trip to the final frontier.
Shatner, who played James T. Kirk, captain of the USS Enterprise in the iconic 1960s TV series Star Trek, has been lauded worldwide for his successful bid to ‘oldly go’ where no one his age has been before.
However, one high-profile observer was less than impressed, and barely had Shatner made it back to Earth, than he was making his feelings known.
In an unprecedented move, Prince William attacked the ‘space tourism’ now being developed by the world’s richest men — of which Shatner was beneficiary — as a waste of resources.
In doing so, he was underlining the Royal Family’s position as perhaps Britain’s most effective environmental pressure group, a position that was reinforced less than 24 hours later by the Queen’s comments about those who talk about protecting the environment ‘. . . but they don’t do’.
This week, William Shatner, (pictured with Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos after the flight) at the grand old age of 90, made his own trip to the final frontier
It was in 1961 that President Kennedy outlined his national goal for the decade of ‘landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth’. He would describe the ‘great and honourable’ mission of reaching the moon and turning the space race into ‘a force for good’.
U.S. ‘leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves and to others, all require us to make this effort’, Kennedy told a world that still retained much of its post-war optimism.
Almost 50 years since the last of the five moon landings, the balance sheet, while not fulfilling in totality JFK’s lofty ambitions, looks broadly in the black.
The technology developed during the space race helped produce many products that have greatly improved our lives, from Velcro and non-stick frying pans to heart pacemakers and kidney dialysis machines.
Just as important, it also gave us the first view of our fragile blue-green oasis in the limitless black desert of space that has done so much to inspire the environmental movement.
However, it is far less possible to find the positives for mankind in William Shatner’s ten-minute jaunt courtesy of Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos.
While it was a PR stroke of genius to invite ‘Captain Kirk’ to be a guest passenger, it was scarcely a surprise. Bezos, who has spent $10 billion and counting on his space company Blue Origin to date, is a Trekkie obsessive who once had a cameo part as an alien in a Star Trek episode.
To Prince William and most of the rest of us I would argue that Bezos’s space ventures — and rival enterprises by Elon Musk and Richard Branson — look like self-indulgence by egotistical and relentlessly competitive billionaires.
It is an impression strengthened by the remarkably phallic shape of the rocket that took Shatner and three fellow passengers aloft. Surely all that money could have been far better spent? Certainly William thinks so
It is an impression strengthened by the remarkably phallic shape of the rocket that took Shatner and three fellow passengers aloft. Surely all that money could have been far better spent? Certainly William thinks so.
‘We need some of the world’s greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live,’ he
