Star Trek: 10 Biggest Takeaways From 'William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill'

On 13 October 2021, William Shatner, then 90 years of age, became the oldest person to go to space when he was launched upwards to the Kármán line aboard Amazon boss Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin capsule. The brief time spent in weightlessness before returning to terra firma forms a central part of You Can Call Me Bill. So fragile, so blue. So Bill.

Long before the Musks and the Bezoses got involved, Star Trek: The Original Series and its cast were already doing their part for the NASA space programme. Nichelle Nichols in particular did groundbreaking work for NASA in the 1970s, helping to recruit women and minority astronauts. As Shatner recalls in You Can Call Me Bill, "they used to say that when Star Trek: [The Original Series]'s ratings went up, the government voted more money [to the space programme]. It was like a self-energising loop."

Turnabout Intruder, the very last episode of The Original Series was filmed between 31 December 1968 and 9 January 1969 and first aired on 3 June 1969. The Eagle of Apollo 11 landed on 20 July 1969. About two years prior, Shatner had been invited to the Kennedy Space Center "during the heyday of [his] Star Trek" where they "literally rolled out the red carpet," taking him to visit the rocket assembly area.

After Star Trek was cancelled, however, Shatner found himself with very little money, living out of a "wrecked truck," unable to "cash a $15 check". It was from that truck, like the hundreds of millions of others watching that day, that Shatner, on his "4 inch black and white television," saw Armstrong step out of the lunar module. As Shatner states in You Can Call Me Bill, and has discussed elsewhere, because of the Apollo Program's link to Star Trek, he thought as he watched:

I was a teeny, teeny, infinitesimally small part of him landing on the moon, and I'm here and he's there. As I went to sleep, I thought of the irony of it. […] There I was in a giant lifetime coincidence of symmetry, of chance.

Of course, Shatner would go back to space in fictional fashion several more times after that, such was the budding popularity of Star Trek in syndication. His real trip, later, to the boundary, would also have a profound impact on him — an existential crisis, if you will… Bill.