William Shatner Trekking to Space For Real at 90 as Part of Next Blue Origin Launch

William Shatner is reportedly finally going to space himself, at age 90. The Star Trek actor is going to be on the next Blue Origin flight, sources told TMZ Friday. Blue Origin, the aerospace company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, had its first crewed, suborbital spaceflight on July 20. If Shatner is on the next flight, he would break the record as the oldest person to go to space after aviator Wally Funk, 82, joined Bezos on the first Blue Origin flight.

Shatner will reportedly be part of the second crew on the New Shepard capsule. Shatner is ready for the October flight, which will only last 15 minutes, sources told TMZ. The mission will also be filmed for a documentary, although it does not have a home yet. Shatner’s team met with the Discovery Channel, but the company passed on it, TMZ reports. Shatner and his team are now in talks with another outlet for the film.

The actor has surprisingly not tweeted about the report. Instead, he has been busy promoting Bill, a new album Shatner recorded with his friend Robert Sahrenow and They Might Be Giants’ Dan Miller. It is his most personal musical work, featuring stories the actor has never shared before. “The Bridge” is about his decision to leave Montreal to pursue acting after he almost drowned, while “Loneliness” is about his fear of dying alone. In an interview with Spin Magazine, Shatner said it “fills me with joy” to perform music.

“I get a physical thrill out of doing it. When it happens and it works, I go ‘Wow, I really did it! I’m singing a song in my own way,’” Shatner told Spin. “I think maybe I’ve devised a whole new way of performing a song. It’s spoken, but it’s not spoken. When you hear some of the great singers speaking, I guess that’s what I’m doing up to a degree. If I hit it right, it’s thrilling to me.” If he really is going to space, he will have another thrill to add to his resume.

Although Shatner hasn’t commented on TMZ‘s latest report, the Captain Kirk actor did suggest he would be interested in going to space during a virtual San Diego Comic-Con panel last year, reports Space.com. “There’s a possibility that I’m going to go up for a brief moment and come back down,” Shatner said while moderating a panel on NASA’s Artemis program. He admitted he was still worried about the “O-ring problem,” one of the issues that led to the 1986 Challenger space shuttle disaster. NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren tried to assure Shatner that the agency has made great strides since that tragedy. noting, “We take the lessons that we learned very seriously, and apply those lessons to how we do business now and how we plan to do business in the future.”