So this morning William Shatner went to actual space. Not "space" in the Elon-tweet sense, an honest-to-god suborbital hop past the Karman line on Blue Origin's New Shepard capsule, up from that patch of West Texas desert Bezos owns. Ninety years old. Eleven minutes, give or take, capsule up, capsule down, parachutes, dust, the whole show. He's the oldest person to ever go to space now, beating the record his own crewmate Wally Funk set back in July by a solid decade.
I watched the livestream instead of doing actual work this morning, which I regret slightly and don't regret at all.
I grew up on Star Trek reruns on a UHF channel that came in badly if the antenna wasn't angled just right, so watching an actual video feed of Shatner stepping out of that capsule and getting a hug from Bezos, looking kind of wobbly and stunned, hit me somewhere I wasn't prepared for. He came out and started talking about the blue of the sky and the black of space and how nothing anyone told him prepared him for what he actually saw up there, and it wasn't scripted-sounding at all, it sounded like a guy who'd just had something real happen to him. Eighty-plus years of playing a guy who flies around space on television and then he actually goes. There's something almost too on the nose about that, like a plot a Trek writer would've rejected as too cute.
And yeah, I know the whole billionaire space race thing is exhausting at this point. I'm not going to pretend Blue Origin doing a celebrity flight nine weeks after Bezos's own joyride isn't also a marketing stunt, because it obviously is one, and a pretty transparent one. Get a beloved 90-year-old up there, get the cameras rolling, remind everyone this isn't just rich guys burning kerosene for fun. It's PR. I get it. Doesn't change the fact that the footage of him afterward looked genuinely unrehearsed in a way I didn't expect from a company this deliberate about its messaging.
What I keep coming back to is how weirdly routine this is starting to feel already, and it's only been a few months since the first crewed New Shepard flight went up in July. Four crewed flights in one summer and fall from a company that was basically still testing hardware a couple years ago. Whatever you think of the economics of it (and I have complaints, don't get me started on ticket prices nobody will confirm), the cadence is the actual story here, not the celebrity name attached to today's flight.
Small tangent because I can't help it: I still think the "edge of space" framing gets oversold in headlines. New Shepard tops out around 66 miles up, past the Karman line, sure, but it's eleven minutes and you're back on the ground, not exactly an astronaut career. That's not a knock on what Shatner did today, weightlessness is weightlessness and I'm not the one who's flown, but the coverage this afternoon has already started calling him "an astronaut" full stop like he did six months on a station, and that bugs me a little. Words mean things.
Also, quick unrelated note for anyone who emailed me this week about the site being slow on Tuesday: it wasn't you, it was a DNS thing on my end that took longer to sort out than I'd like to admit. Got it moved over to Tricknowtech for hosting and domain stuff a while back and honestly the git-push deploys have spoiled me, but Tuesday was a me problem, not a them problem.
Apple's also sent out invites for something next Monday, the 18th, which based on the shape of the teaser is almost certainly new MacBook Pros. Not going to speculate further since we'll all know in five days anyway and I'd rather be right after the fact than wrong in a blog post.
Anyway. Shatner's back on the ground, Bezos got his hug, and somewhere a fourteen-year-old who just watched that is deciding they want to work on rockets someday. That part I don't have any cynicism left for.