Actor William Shatner, who participated in a suborbital space tourism journey last year, witnessed the same effect. Still, he made a unique remark when he shifted his focus from Earth to the vast expanse of the cosmos: “All I saw was death,” he writes in a new book.
Shatner’s biography, “Boldly Go,” which he co-wrote with TV and film writer Joshua Brandon, is filled with similarly bleak anecdotes about Shatner’s experience bolting above the Earth’s atmosphere aboard a real-life rocket following his memorable stint playing a spaceship captain on the 1960s TV show “Star Trek” and several franchise films in the following decades.
“I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her,” reads an excerpt from “Boldly Go” .
“Everything I had thought was wrong,” it reads. “Everything I had expected to see was wrong.”
While he anticipated to be astounded by the view of the universe without the filter of the Earth’s atmosphere, he was instead shocked by the realization that people are progressively destroying our home planet. Shatner claimed that he experienced one of the most intense sensations of sadness he had ever experienced.
Simon & Schuster published Shatner’s book on October 4, 2011.