THE DAY AN ACTOR WENT TO SPACE

I’m currently watching (well it’s on while I work) the live stream of William Shatner going into space on Jeff Bezos’s rocket. They’ve locked themselves into the capsule, the countdown clock is ticking and the Blue Origin New Shepard space rocket is quietly waiting on the launch pad.

How about that. The boss of a parcel delivery company is sending an actor into space in a giant pencil.

“Somewhere out there,” said one of the presenters, “Leondard Nimoy is watching.”

Maybe. But I was under the impression they didn’t get on, on the set of Star Trek. If anything, Leonard Nimoy’s probably watching George Takei grow more and more furious about the whole thing.

Space travel still amazes me. Only six decades separate the Wright Brothers and the Apollo 11 mission, and here, just over a hundred years after someone figured out how to fly a bicycle, there are a few people (admittedly billionaires) making it commercially possible for us to float above the Karman line.

“That up there, is the future,” says Shatner on video, “Taking the pollution out of the Earth and putting it up there, that has got to be the future.”

Close your ears if you’re not a fan of capitalism, I thought. It all sounds good, but polluting the big pond to detoxify the little one is probably just as terrible as it sounds.

The gantry retracted. I’m guessing that’s the point of no return for the astronauts. The aft fins get checked next, then the rocket ignites and off they go. The plan is that the rocket separates from the capsule, then slowly, the capsule tumbles back from weightlessness to Earth.

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“I hope I never recover from this,” he said, standing in the dust of the West Texan desert. Shatner was overwhelmed by the speed, at the vastness and quickness of the blue sky, and the moment he saw how vulnerable we are in this skin-like atmosphere.

“It’s so thin! And then you’re moving at two thousand miles an hour, and in instant you’re in the black of space, and it’s death. It’s nothingness, it’s death," he marvelled, "Everybody in the world should do this.”

Jeff Bezos listened carefully, watching Shatner from behind his sunglasses. The actor tried to compose himself but was clearly overwhelmed by his experience.

“What you’ve done,” he said, laying a big hand on Bezos’s shoulder, “...is incredible.”

There is an irony isn’t there, that the fragility of our planet was witnessed by a millionaire, blasted into space by a billionaire. Fragility, yes, only visible because of itself; the poverty, the pain, the inequality, the dirt of a world that’s boiling into oblivion, while pushing a handful of people into the obscenity of riches - yet without that inequality, Amazon could not exist, and we’d not know how ‘Captain Kirk’ really feels about space travel. Jeff Bezos, who could probably solve poverty and still have his bus fare home, clearly has a plan that’s more about tomorrow than it is today.

I’m not getting political about Amazon by the way, nor Branson, nor Musk. I think the world is far more complicated than I understand it to be, and the responsibility of the super wealthy is probably a tougher calling for them than anyone really knows.

I’m not criticising Shatner either. It was touching to see him express such vulnerability in the face of a humbling experience. Around him in that early morning sunlight, crew members and company executives were popping corks, whooping and spraying each other with expensive champagne to celebrate a successful flight. Bezos, the boss, just ignored all that and listened as a 90 year old man poetically explained something he knew to be almost indescribable about life, about death and about humanity, all from the view of 100,000 feet.

I thought that scene, in the shadow of a space capsule, touched down in the desert, was quite moving.