Mike Blake

VAN HORN Texas (Reuters – Blue Origin, a multi-billionaire U.S. company, will launch its second suborbital flight Wednesday with actor William Shatner – who embodied various aspects of space travel in the TV series “Star Trek”.

Shatner is expected to be the oldest man in space at 90. His crewmates and he are due to take off at 9 AM (1000 GMT/1530 EDT/1530 GMT), aboard the fully-autonomous New Shepard spacecraft, which is 60 feet tall (18.3m) from Blue Origin’s launch pad about 20 miles (32.5 km) west of Van Horn in rural Texas.

Ex-NASA engineer Chris Boshuizen and Glen de Vries, a clinical researcher entrepreneur and Blue Origin vice President and engineer Audrey Powers will join Shatner on this approximately 10-minute trip.

New Shepard should carry the passengers above 60 miles (96 km), allowing them to lose weight before the crew capsule descends to Texas. For wind-related reasons, the flight was moved back one day from its original Tuesday schedule.

Blue Origin announced on Twitter: “All systems are up for launch” that all four of their crew went through Tuesday’s training and that they had completed an evaluation on flight-readiness to confirm the team was ready.

Blue Origin’s successful first space tourism flight was conducted on July 20. Bezos, three other passengers and Bezos flew to the edge and returned on an 11 minute and 10 second trip. Wally Funk, a pioneering female pilot and aviator at the time of her flight became the oldest human to fly into space.

Blue Origin was established by Bezos in 2000, who is the current CEO of Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ.).

Shatner was 90 years old in March. His acting career began in the 1950s. Most well-known for his role as Captain James T. Kirk, the Starship Enterprise’s captain on “Star Trek”, a classic 1960s TV show. Seven subsequent movies about fictional adventures in space were made.

Shatner’s role as an actor was synonymous with space explorations. He called space “the last frontier” in the opening credits for each episode and promised to explore new planets, seek out new life, and build new civilizations.

Shatner stated that there’s both irony as well as symmetry in his space journey, after he has been a space explorer for many decades and is now actually being one.

Shatner said that this was no cakewalk on “CBS Mornings.”

I want to travel into space. I would like to see the Earth. It is my desire to understand what it takes to save the Earth. Shatner stated, “I want to see the world from a different perspective than what I have seen before.”

Blue Origin has been able to generate media coverage for Shatner as it faces two billionaire rivals – Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic Holdings (NYSE.) Inc) – who are looking to lure customers ready to spend large sums in order to fly spaceflight.

Branson launched his space tourism company on July 11th, riding with six others on the VSS Unity rocket aircraft. SpaceX is a space-tourism company that has already launched numerous astronauts, cargo payloads, and crew members to NASA’s International Space Station. In September, SpaceX flew the first ever all-civil crew into orbit.

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration stated that it would review safety concerns raised earlier by Blue Origin employees. These workers have claimed that Blue Origin prioritized speed and cost saving over quality control or adequate staffing.