Around 55 years ago, James T. Kirk first explored where no man had gone before on the hit television show, Star Trek.
Life will imitate art in 2021 as actor William Shatner, the man who played Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise, will venture into space. The 90-year-old Shatner is scheduled to board Blue Origins next flight on the New Shephard rocket on Oct. 12.
Blue Origin is the space travel company founded by the founder and former CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. The company last made headlines earlier this summer when Bezos traveled on his company’s first flight with people on board.
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However, Blue Origin has recently received some worrying negative press after a group of 21 former and current employees of the company published an essay online raising issues about safety measures and a toxic workplace environment.
“We have seen a pattern of decision-making that often prioritizes execution speed and cost reduction over the appropriate resourcing to ensure quality,” reads the essay. “In 2018, when one team lead took over, the team had documented more than 1,000 problem reports related to the engines that power Blue Origin’s rockets, which had never been addressed.”
The concerns were raised by the former head of Blue Origin Employee Communications, Alexandra Abrams, and 20 other anonymous current and former employees.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has said it will investigate the safety concerns that were raised.
At 90-years-old, Shatner would become the oldest person to have traveled to space. The previous record was set on that Blue Origin flight which Bezos was on. The 82-year old aerospace trailblazer Wally Funk joined the e-commerce billionaire on his jaunt to space in July.
The duration of Shatner’s trip should take about 10 minutes from takeoff to landing, which should be a walk in the park compared to five-year-long missions that Captain Kirk went on in the TV show.
