Astronauts have for decades described their trips to space as breathtaking and humbling, a reminder of the Earth’s fragility and humanity’s need to serve as stewards of our home planet.
Actor William Shatner, who joined a suborbital space tourism flight last year, experienced the same phenomenon, but he had a very distinct observation when he turned his gaze from the Earth to a black expanse of the cosmos: All I saw was death, he wrote in a new book.
Shatner’s biography, called Boldly Go, which he co-wrote with TV and film writer Joshua Brandon, is filled with similarly grim anecdotes about Shatner’s experience bolting above the Earth’s atmosphere aboard a real-life rocket after his memorable stint playing a spaceship captain on the 1960s TV show “Star Trek” and several franchise movies in the following decades.
I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of the Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds, and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her,” reads an excerpt from Boldly Go that was first published by Variety.
Everything I had thought was wrong, it reads. Everything I had expected to see was wrong.
While he had expected to be awed at the vision of the cosmos, seen without the filter of the Earth’s atmosphere, he instead became overwhelmed by the idea that humans are slowly destroying our home planet. He felt one of the strongest feelings of grief he’s ever encountered, Shatner wrote.
Shatner’s book was released on October 4 by the publishing house Simon and Schuster. CNN interviewed him in June about the book, his trip to space with the Jeff Bezos-backed space tourism company Blue Origin, and what’s next for the 91-year-old. A transcript of the interview, edited for length and clarity, is below.
Are you anxious to go back to space?
Shatner: If you had a great love affair, could you go back? Or would that demean it?
You mentioned you got a chance to speak with famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking before he died. What was that experience like?
Shatner: I was never able to ask him about String Theory, which I wanted to. We had to get him all the questions in advance. And he had said when we made the arrangement, ‘I want to ask Shatner a question.’
Finally, I’m leaning in, you know, we’re sitting side by side looking at the cameras.
So he laboriously typed out, ‘What is your favorite Star Trek episode?’ which is the question every fan asks, and I started laughing. He couldn’t laugh (because of his degenerative disease, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS).
But his laughter showed in the redness of his face and he got so red. He then invited me to dinner. I had a beautiful moment with him.
What are you doing next?
Shatner: I should take the opportunity to say I have an album out there called Bill. And I kept making songs with my collaborators. The song “So Fragile, So Blue, is very much about my experience in space. I recently performed with (musician) Ben Folds at the Kennedy Center. That could be a TV show or an album.
I also have a wonderful show called “The UnXplained” on the History Channel. And then I have my book, called “Boldly Go,” coming out in the fall.
