![]() ![]() But you can imagine how quickly spaceflight superlatives could go the way of Mount Everest milestones, becoming extremely specific, too long, and probably too snoozy to fit into a headline. “People constantly wrote to me about wanting to be the first couple to get married in space, the first woman to have her baby in space,” even the first to have sex in space, he said. ![]() “Everyone wanted to be the first of their profession to go,” Ladwig said. In the 1980s, Ladwig managed NASA’s spaceflight-participant program, an effort to fly ordinary citizens alongside professional astronauts, and he received a deluge of letters from interested candidates. “I think there will be just a constant stream of firsts,” Alan Ladwig, a former NASA program manager and the author of See You In Orbit? Our Dream of Spaceflight, told me. Another, Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant, became the first person to go to space with a prosthesis, a titanium rod in her leg that she said would have kept her from becoming a professional astronaut. One of them, Sian Proctor, a geosciences professor whose astronaut application NASA had rejected, became the first Black woman to pilot a spacecraft. This new calculus was on display last month when a tech billionaire chartered a SpaceX journey and took three less-wealthy people with him. Even as it imposed new requirements for leaving Earth- money, for the customers booking the tickets, and luck, for the people they might decide to bring along-it has removed NASA’s stringent expectations about age, physical fitness, educational degrees, professional experience, and other factors. Space tourism was always going to expand our vision of spacefarers in this way. Read: The new ‘right stuff’ is money and luck And many of these superlatives will go to the highest bidder. There could be many firsts (the first opera singer, the first former James Bond, the first member of the royal family) and plenty of other extremes (the shortest, the tallest, the oldest yet again). Shatner didn’t pay for his new historic record-he flew on the New Shepard rocket for free-but others can, and already have: Another Blue Origin passenger, Oliver Daemen, at age 18, became the youngest person (and first teenager) to reach space because his dad, a private-equity executive, bought him a seat. I present this slightly absurd list to illustrate that, thanks to commercial spaceflight, we’re entering an unprecedented time of space superlatives. He also became the first Canadian actor to fly to space-not the first actor ever Russia claimed that feat just last week-and the first person with a successful music career, and certainly the first winner of the World’s Championship Horse Show to go. The 90-year-old actor just became the oldest person to reach space, surpassing the previous record set by the aviation legend Wally Funk, 82, just a few months ago. The journey, Shatner said after, was “the most profound experience.” And it made history. (I’ve never seen the show-sorry! Did you want me to lie about it?) Insert your favorite Star Trek reference here. ![]() Captain Kirk has now made it to space and back. Shatner, clad in a cobalt-blue spacesuit, took that rocket to the edge of space this morning, along with three other passengers, for a few minutes of weightlessness and a beautiful view. “Things like that go up and boom in the night. He’d never seen that footage before, he said, with all that “fire and brimstone.” “Oh my gosh,” the actor said. A week ago, during a CNN interview, his eyes went wide when the network showed a clip of a Blue Origin rocket taking off, streams of blazing exhaust unfurling from below. ![]() William Shatner was a little nervous about that rocket. ![]()
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