Actor, director, author, and singer William Shatner is best known for his role as Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek.
On October 13, 2021, Shatner became the oldest person to go to space as he boarded Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space shuttle with three other people: Audrey Powers, a Blue Origin vice president; Chris Boshuizen, who co-founded the Earth-imaging satellite company Planet; and Glen de Vries, an American businessman, molecular biologist, and co-founder of Medidata Solutions.
The flight lasted around 10 minutes, taking off from the Texas desert and reaching a maximum altitude just above 60 miles past the Kármán line.
As they climbed to a maximum altitude, those aboard experienced a short period of weightlessness; they were also able to see the curvature of the Earth through the capsule’s windows.
Shatner was surprised by his own reaction to the experience; in his book Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder, he described the trip and, more importantly, how it left him feeling.
“Everything I had thought was wrong. Everything I had expected to see was wrong,” he added. “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.”
Every time Shatner speaks about that experience, he gets so emotional. He keeps mentioning how seeing Earth from that distance evoked a deep sense of mortality and grief.
The grief Shatner felt is not uncommon among astronauts. It’s called the “Overview Effect,”.
Author Frank White coined the term Overview Effect in his 1987 book, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution.
“There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity,” Frank White wrote.
Blue Origin’s last space trip was the New Shepard NS-38 mission, which launched on January 22, 2026, from West Texas.
Shatner is currently working on an album titled What the F is Heavy Metal, and hosting a podcast about living in the present with his daughter Melanie, titled No Time But Now.
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