Actor, writer, director and producer William Shatner, now 90 and showing no signs of leaving us for a few more decades, can now add ‘astronaut’ to his list of occupations.

Though if you’ve heard his bizarre ‘singing-while-speaking’ version of “Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds” you’ll understand why he’s never troubled the pop charts.

After exploring the galaxies as Captain (and eventually Admiral) James Tiberius Kirk in three series of “Star Trek” and seven feature films, on October 13 Bill Shatner achieved his life-long ambition of actually travelling into space.

He was one of four passengers on board a Blue Origin rocket owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, one of the brains behind the concept of space tourism, the others being Richard Branson and Elon Musk.

The flight may only have lasted 10 minutes, but it must have taken a lot of courage for a man of Bill Shatner’s age to climb into a rocket about to blast off into space. He admitted that, after his launch had been delayed several times he began to feel ‘slightly nervous’.  Who wouldn’t?

Before, after and possibly during the flight, Bill kept his Blue Origin baseball cap firmly on his head. The suspicion is that this wasn’t only out of loyalty to the company who provided his free flight, but also because he allegedly wasn’t wearing his luxuriant and completely undetectable hairpiece.
If that’s true – and I’m not saying it is – then William Shatner can claim to be the oldest person ‘To baldly go where no man has gone before!”