William Shatner, at 90, set to boldly go to space

William Shatner, who played Captain Kirk in the beloved Star Trek franchise, is reportedly set to boldly go where no 90-year-old has gone before, becoming one of fewer than 600 people to have reached the edge of space or beyond.

According to a report in TMZ, the Jewish Canadian actor will take a real trip to space next month on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket ship.

The trip, similar to the company’s first manned flight in July, will see Shatner blasted into space for a 15-minute civilian flight, which will include several minutes of weightlessness to float around the capsule, the report said.

The flight and the run-up to it are being filmed for a documentary currently being shopped to a number of entertainment outlets, the report said.

Bezos himself was aboard Blue Origin’s first manned flight, which also included a hand-picked group: his brother, an 18-year-old from the Netherlands and an 82-year-old aviation pioneer from Texas — the youngest and oldest to ever fly in space.

Shatner’s flight would break that record by eight years.

William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk from the television program Star Trek. (NBC Television/Wikipedia/public domain)

Shatner first swaggered onto the bridge of the starship Enterprise in the 1966 original television series, which has spawned four spin-off series and 13 feature films, including the 2016 “Star Trek Beyond.”

Blue Origin — founded by Bezos in 2000 in Kent, Washington, near Amazon’s Seattle headquarters — hasn’t revealed its price for a ride to space, but some reports have said that tickets for the first flight cost up to $20 million.

Blue Origin is working on a massive rocket, New Glenn, to put payloads and people into orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The company also wants to put astronauts back on the moon with its proposed lunar lander Blue Moon, in effect challenging SpaceX, which has been awarded NASA’s sole contract so far.