In this exclusive excerpt, Shatner interviews Amazon founder Jeff Bezos about how the science fiction he loved as a kid — namely, “Star Trek” — ultimately inspired him to launch his Blue Origin aerospace company, which, in 2021, launched Shatner into space at 90 years old.
I also detailed in “Boldly Go” Jeff’s grand plan for one day launching Earth’s polluting industries into outer space to try to allow us to repair the environmental damage we’ve done and continue to do, and I hope for the sake of Earth and everyone living here now and into the future that his mission is achievable. What I did not know until I spoke to Jeff for this book was how he wound up in the space business in the first place, and how Star Trek kick-started his very real journey to the stars.
“The idea that there could be this shining future was so appealing,” he told me.
“The three of us would round up other friends and younger siblings and assign them the lesser roles,” he said. “The two roles that got fought over the most were Kirk and Spock. I often played Kirk, and I often played Spock. From there, we’d work our way down. Someone would even play the computer!”
The idea of having a conversation with a computer enthralled Jeff, and years later, he set about creating one: Amazon’s Alexa and Echo devices are patterned on that very same “Star Trek” computer he grew up watching.
So fierce was Jeff’s devotion to “Star Trek” and the make-believe stories he and his friends would play that he even built paper cut-out communicators and tricorders — which he still has to this day and keeps among his most prized possessions. Somehow, he decided that “Star Trek” wasn’t just a vision of the future; it could be the future, and he wanted to do anything he could to make it happen.
“Literally from that day,” he told me, “I’ve been obsessed with space, space travel, rockets, propulsion, all the engineering that goes with it.”
She may be right. In his high school newspaper, an article quoted a young Jeff as saying he wanted to build a space travel company by the time he was 16. He didn’t quite make it happen that quickly, but today, Blue Origin has taken nearly 100 people above the Kármán Line to gaze at the beautiful Blue Marble below. One of Jeff’s goals with Blue Origin is to help humanity on its journey to the Star Trek future.
There are people in this book whose connection to different parts of my work surprised me because it led them into medicine, music, law, engineering, education, public service, or simply through an especially difficult stretch of life. Jeff’s story contains perhaps the most literal transformation of imagination into reality. He watched a future on television, then devoted part of his life to making pieces of it possible.
As a child, Jeff Bezos and his friends arranged chairs outside and pretended they were sitting on the bridge of the Enterprise. Years later, Jeff built a rocket, and he took Captain Kirk along for the ride.
What is next is only bound by imagination.
“William Shatner … And You” is currently available for sale on williamshatnerandyou.com and via Amazon.
William Shatner and Joshua Brandon.
