Star Trek actor William Shatner flew into space on Blue Origin.

Star Trek actor William Shatner blast into space on Blue Origin thanks to a spaceship from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

“Star Trek” actor William Shatner flew into space on Blue Origin.

As “Captain Kirk” William Shatner became a “Star Trek” icon. Thanks to a spaceship from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, he is now the oldest person to have traveled into space.

Star Trek is an American science fiction media franchise created by Gene Roddenberry, which began with the eponymous 1960s series and quickly became a worldwide pop-culture phenomenon.

The franchise began with Star Trek: The Original Series, which debuted in the US on September 8, 1966, and aired for three seasons on NBC. It was first broadcast on September 6, 1966, on Canada’s CTV network. It followed the voyages of the starship USS Enterprise, a space exploration vessel built by the United Federation of Planets in the 23rd century, on a mission “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before”. In creating Star Trek, Roddenberry was inspired by C. S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series of novels, Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels, the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, and television westerns such as Wagon Train.

The Star Trek canon includes the Original Series, nine spin-off television series, and a film franchise; further adaptations also exist in several media. After the conclusion of the Original Series, the adventures of its characters continued in the 22-episode Star Trek: The Animated Series and six feature films. A television revival beginning in the 1980s saw three sequel series and a prequel: Star Trek: The Next Generation, following the crew of a new starship Enterprise a century after the original series; Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, set in the same era as the Next Generation; and Enterprise, set before the original series in the early days of human interstellar travel. The adventures of the Next Generation crew continued in four additional feature films.

In 2009, the film franchise underwent a reboot, creating an alternate continuity known as the Kelvin timeline; three films have been set in this continuity. The newest Star Trek television revival, beginning in 2017, includes the series Star Trek: Discovery, Picard, Short Treks, and Lower Decks, streaming exclusively on digital platforms. At least two additional television series are in development: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Star Trek: Prodigy.

The entire premise of Star Trek was utopian: it pushed the limits of diversity, progressivism and inclusion on television and the science fiction genre

Blue Origin, created by Jeff Bezos in September 2000, aims to make space flight more available to individuals who can afford it.