Where quite a few men (and several women) have gone before…
Captain Kirk is headed to outer space.
For real this time.
It won’t be another mission of the starship Enterprise –just Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space capsule. No “five-year mission” either – just about 10 minutes up and back from West Texas.
No warp drive.
No Federation.
But William Shatner – 90-years-old and still chubby – will be weightless and able to lay claim to having gone where no man so old has gone before.
Gotta admit, it’s sorta neat.
After all, Mr. Scott had to wait until he was ashes to get into orbit…
Ok, I’m a hopeless, unregenerate Trekkie. I was a 14-year-old sci-fi nerd when the first episode aired 55 years ago and here I am, reupping my subscription to Paramount+ waiting for the next episodes of Picard and Discovery to drop. I’ve spent most of my life hobnobbing with Vulcans, Tellarites and a Klingon or two – at least in those dark wee hours when awareness hovers on the threshold of sleep and the boundaries of here and there, now and then, real and almost-so sort of slip away into wishful dreaming – though I realize if I were to turn up in the 23rd, 24th, or 25th century it would likely be as a Ferengi rather than a First Officer…
Still, Oct. 12 will let us glimpse a small, tantalizing intersection of fact and fantasy. A little good news when we all need that. Yeah, I know there’s no small measure of incredulity due the spectacle of three billionaires hotly competing to do what Alan Shepard did 60 years ago. There does seem to be considerable self-indulgent silliness to it. Really, aren’t there better things for them to spend their money on?
Well, in all honesty, not being a billionaire myself, I’m really not in a position to know. I manage to keep the heat on and not miss any meals, but billionaireism is well beyond my personal experience and understanding. Even so, it’s hard not to get my back up a little, pretty much assured in the assumed self-knowledge that if it were me with those multiple mega-bucks I’d busy myself feeding the hungry and clothing the naked rather than trying to build the world’s most impressive carnival ride.
Now I’m sure somebody will remind me that the Prosperity Gospel says that the poor will always be with us, but at 90, Bill Shatner definitely has a limited shelf life.
True enough. But seriously, isn’t there a better use for all those millions?
Probably, depending on what your idea of “better” is. Then again, shouldn’t the Wright Brothers have had “better” things to do with their time than horse around with really big kites down there at Kitty Hawk? And what about Galileo dropping stuff off the Leaning Tower of Pisa and staying up way too late looking at the sky with that telescope of his?
Or could it be that if Steve Jobs had gotten a real after school job instead of horsing around with gizmos in his garage we’d still be listening for a dial tone instead of wasting half our days fiddling with our iPhones?
It might be good to remember that Bezos got his start having a few folks use their computers to order books. Lotsa folks figured that people had been ordering books by mail and over the phone dang near forever, so what’s the big deal about another way to order books?
A few hundred billion dollars later, Amazon looks a bit more impressive, and Jeff Bezos is playing with rockets…
Well, as any Trekkie can tell you, it’s in 2063 that Zephram Cochrane throws the switch on humankind’s first warp drive. It took Bezos 27 years to go from books to billions -- 2063 is 42 years away. And they never did say where Zephram got his grubstake…
Make it so.