Irish Examiner view: To boldly go...

By becoming the oldest person to reach space, William Shatner has proved that you are never too old to stay forever young

William Shatner smiles after his trip to space this week. Picture: AP

The name William Shatner might not trip off the tongue for many people but the name James T Kirk surely does, at least for those of a certain age. It was Kirk who captained the Starship Enterprise in the TV series Star Trek, giving rise to the most notable split infinitive in the English language — “to boldly go where no man has gone before”.

He has just done that by becoming the oldest person to reach space, proving that you are never too old to stay forever young. The 90-year-old blasted off from Texas on a Blue Origin rocket — the space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Fellow billionaires Richard Branson and Elon Musk have developed their own space programmes, prompting criticism of what is being called the billionaire space race.

Shatner called his trip “the most profound experience” he ever had and said: “I hope I never recover from this.” As his alter ego, Captain Kirk once declared in an early episode of Star Trek, “They used to say that if Man was meant to fly, he’d have wings, but he did fly.”