The American company Blue Origin announced Monday that it is planning its next space tourism mission on October 12, a flight that could include on board a very apropos celebrity: William Shatner, who played the legendary Captain Kirk in the

Star Trek

series

.

According to the people information site

TMZ

, the mission should embark the Canadian actor, who at 90 would then become the oldest person to go to space.

For its part, Blue Origin declined to comment on the information.

The flight will take place less than three months after the mission during which the company transported its first four passengers, including its founder Jeff Bezos. Four people will board the New Sheppard rocket again on October 12. Two names have been announced and two more will be revealed "in the next few days," Blue Origin said in a statement. Takeoff is scheduled from West Texas at 1:30 p.m. GMT (8:30 a.m. local time).

One of the two passengers will be Chris Boshuizen, a former NASA engineer and the co-founder of Planet Labs, a private American company that photographs the Earth in high resolution every day using satellites.

“This is the fulfillment of my biggest childhood dream,” he said.

The other lucky winner is Glen de Vries, co-founder of the company Medidata Solutions, specializing in clinical trial monitoring software for the pharmaceutical industry and acquired in 2019 by Dassault Systèmes.

Float in zero gravity

The winner of an auction was also initially to fly aboard the first manned flight in July, alongside the founder of Amazon, after paying $ 28 million. But this mysterious person had ultimately not participated in the mission, officially for reasons of timing. A spokeswoman for Blue Origin said on Monday that information would be released "soon" about her.

The trip proposed by Blue Origin is an experience of a few minutes above the Karman Line which marks, at an altitude of 100 km, the border of space according to the international convention.

Passengers can detach themselves from their seats and float for a few moments in zero gravity.

The fully automated rocket takes off vertically and the capsule detaches in flight, before falling back to Earth, braked by three parachutes and a back-prop.

Another company, Virgin Galactic, offers a similar experience.

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