William Shatner to Fly into Space on Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Rocket at 90 Years Old: 'What a Miracle'


William Shatner

Star Trek alum William Shatner is making his way to space, and at 90 years old, he will set the record for the oldest person to do so!

On Monday, Jeff Bezos' aerospace company Blue Origin announced the Emmy Award-winning actor will travel on the New Shepard rocket for the NS-18 mission - the historic program's eighteenth mission.

Joining the star will be Audrey Powers, Blue Origin's Vice President of Mission and Flight Operations. Crew members Chris Boshuizen and Glen de Vries will also be on board the flight, which lifts off from Launch Site One in West Texas on Oct. 12.

"I've heard about space for a long time now," Shatner said in a statement. "I'm taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle."

Powers, who has been with Blue Origin since 2013, oversees New Shepard flight operations, vehicle maintenance, and launch, landing, and ground support infrastructure. She also played a lead role in the multi-year process to certify New Shepard for human flight.

"I'm so proud and humbled to fly on behalf of Team Blue, and I'm excited to continue writing Blue's human spaceflight history," said Powers, adding, "As an engineer and lawyer with more than two decades of experience in the aerospace industry, I have great confidence in our New Shepard team and the vehicle we've developed."

"I was curious about space from a young age, and my parents fed that curiosity by giving me a telescope," she said of her lifelong love. "I would see the Moon and envision what the surface would feel like if I could touch it with my hand, and wonder what it would be like if I lived floating up there in a spacesuit - now I will get to experience what I dreamed about as a little girl."

A source previously told PEOPLE Shatner was in talks to travel into space. "He's almost certainly going, but they're still working out the finer points," the insider said at the time.

This will be the second flight for Blue Origin following its inaugural trip to space in July. Bezos, 57, was joined by his brother Mark, as well as both the oldest and the youngest people to ever fly to space: 82-year-old Wally Funk and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, respectively.
The mission was the first space flight with humans on board for Blue Origin, the aerospace manufacturing and spaceflight company the billionaire founded in 2000.

According to the official website, the New Shepard seats six astronauts, and since the ship is "fully autonomous," there is no pilot, making everyone onboard a passenger. The reusable vehicle takes 11-minute flights into space, "designed to take astronauts and research payloads past the Kármán line — the internationally recognized boundary of space."

Bezos' flight came just nine days after fellow billionaire Sir Richard Branson took his first trip to space aboard the VSS Unity spacecraft, Virgin Galactic's first fully crewed flight test. Branson, 71, took off alongside five others from Sierra County, New Mexico on an hour-long journey to and from suborbital space on July 11.

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