Bezos' Blue Origin To Send William Shatner Into Space Is Captain Kirk.

At the age of 90, the actor became the oldest person to fly in space. I've been hearing about space for a long time. Finally, I took the opportunity to see it in person. It was a miracle," Shatner said in a statement. Shatner will join three others aboard Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket for the two companies' space flights.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos joined the first flight crew in July with his brother, an 82-year-old space pioneer and an 18-year-old college student. Media caption, As Jeff Bezos and his crew, take off on New Shepard's first human flight into space. Like previous flights, the journey is expected to take about 10 minutes in October and take the crew past the pocket line - the most famous space boundary of 100 km (60 miles) above the earth.

Blue Origin said Audrey Powers, vice president of missions and operations, would also be on the flight, a former NASA engineer and co-founder of a software company specializing in clinical research. Shatner, a Canadian actor, is best known from his role as Captain James T Kirk from  the USS Enterprise in the original Star Trek television series in the 1960s and later appearing in the franchise's films.

According to reports from 2013, he had turned down Sir Richard Branson's offer to take him into space with Virgin Galactic, the billionaire space company that brought Sir Richard to the edge of the area in July. That's when Sir Richard told The Sun that Shatner was afraid of flying.

Last year, The Times revealed that the ashes of James Duhan, who plays Scotty Scott of Montgomery, were smuggled onto the International Space Station in 2008, three years after Duhan's death. The new Shepard, built by Bezos Blue Origin, will serve the growing space tourism market.

Under the New Space name, more and more entrepreneurs are participating in the race to create cheap, commercialized space travel. Bezos' Blue Origin made headlines recently after 21 employees and former employees said they were ignoring security concerns to gain an advantage in the space race and complaining about a culture of sexism. Blue Origin denies the allegations, saying it retains its security data.