{"id":17344,"date":"2022-10-10T17:08:53","date_gmt":"2022-10-10T09:08:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/william-shatner-describes-overwhelming-sadness-he-felt-for-earth-in-his-blue-origin-flight-to-space\/"},"modified":"2022-10-10T17:08:53","modified_gmt":"2022-10-10T09:08:53","slug":"william-shatner-describes-overwhelming-sadness-he-felt-for-earth-in-his-blue-origin-flight-to-space","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/william-shatner-describes-overwhelming-sadness-he-felt-for-earth-in-his-blue-origin-flight-to-space\/","title":{"rendered":"William Shatner describes \u2018overwhelming sadness\u2019 he felt for Earth in his Blue Origin flight to space"},"content":{"rendered":"
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William Shatner stares out from Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard suborbital spaceship during his flight last October. (Blue Origin Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

William Shatner\u2019s journey to the final frontier aboard a Blue Origin spaceship last fall seemed like the perfect opportunity to strike profound joy and celebration into a man who had played a space traveler on TV for decades.<\/p>\n

But Shatner, who was 90 at the time of his flight, and is a longtime environmental advocate, writes in a new book that the experience was among the strongest feelings of grief that he had ever encountered.<\/p>\n

In an excerpt of \u201cBoldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder,\u201d published by Variety last week, the Star Trek actor wrote that everything he expected to feel about going to space was wrong.<\/p>\n

\n

I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things\u2014that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe. In the film \u201cContact,\u201d when Jodie Foster\u2019s character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, \u201cThey should\u2019ve sent a poet.\u201d I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn\u2019t out there, it\u2019s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.<\/p>\n

It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That account matches some of the emotion that Shatner displayed upon landing in the West Texas desert on Oct. 13 as the oldest human to ever travel to space. He greeted Jeff Bezos, telling the Blue Origin and Amazon founder that the 10-minute trip was the most profound experience he could imagine. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m so filled with emotion about what just happened. It\u2019s extraordinary,\u201d Shatner said at the time. \u201cI hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now. I don\u2019t want to lose it. It\u2019s so much larger than me and life.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Blue Origin spacefliers after landing on Oct. 13, from left: Audrey Powers, William Shatner, Chris Boshuizen and Glen de Vries. (Blue Origin Photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Shatner traveled with three other spacefliers: Chris Boshuizen, a venture capitalist who co-founded Planet Labs; Glen de Vries, a co-founder of Medidata Solutions who is now an executive at Dassault Systems; and Audrey Powers, Blue Origin\u2019s vice president of New Shepard mission and flight operations.<\/p>\n

In his book, he said he later learned that his feelings were not unique.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is called the \u2018Overview Effect\u2019 and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others,\u201d Shatner wrote. \u201cEssentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet\u2019s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an interview with The Washington Post, Shatner expanded on the grief he feels for the planet and how, at 91 now, he views the experience as \u201ca clarion call\u201d to stop climate change. <\/p>\n

\u201cI am aware that every moment that goes by, things that took 5 billion years to emerge are going extinct,\u201d Shatner told The Post. \u201cWe\u2019ll never know them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

William Shatner stares out from Blue Origin\u2019s New Shepard suborbital spaceship during his flight last October. (Blue Origin Photo) William Shatner\u2019s journey to the final frontier aboard a Blue Origin spaceship last fall seemed like the perfect opportunity to strike profound joy and celebration into a man who had played a space traveler on TV […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[509,21,493,4438],"class_list":["post-17344","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-blue-origin","tag-space","tag-space-tourism","tag-william-shatner"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17344"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17344"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17344\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}