Star Trek’s William Shatner Wants to Fill in for NASA During Shutdown

Star Trek‘s original leading man, William Shatner, is ready to go to space for real. Shatner has said in the past that he’d be willing to head into space with SpaceX founder Elon Musk at his side. Tom Cruise is planning to enter orbit for an upcoming film. Now Shatner’s sending signals to NASA suggesting he’s ready for launch. The original Capt. James T. Kirk tweeted at NASA to let the organization know that “the suit does fit!” He attached an image of himself in a spacesuit. It sounds like Shatner is ready for takeoff. You can see the tweet and the image for yourself embedded below.

In 2019, a fan on Twitter asked Shatner if he’d take up a hypothetical offer from Musk to go into space. “Yes, with him in the seat next to me,” Shatner replied. “I’ll hold his hand during takeoff as an added bonus!”

While Shatner, at least in jest, seems ready for a real-life voyage into space, he won’t be suiting up in a Starfleet uniform any time soon. “No. I think Kirk’s story is pretty well played out at this point,” Shatner tweeted in response to a fan’s question about the possibility of him reprising the role.

Shatner seemed skeptical of the idea when ComicBook.com spoke to him ahead of his Grand Ole Opry performance in 2019. When asked about the possibility of resurrecting Kirk for a series similar to Star Trek: Picard, Shatner said, “That word, ‘resurrect.’ That’s a key word. Resurrect. You’d have to resurrect me, Shatner, in order to do the daily. I don’t know what Patrick is doing doing that. Doing a series is debilitating for a young guy, for a 25-year-old, which I was doing when I was 25 years old. It’s a physical wrecker, it’s a mental wrecker, and it’s a homewrecker ’cause you’re working 14, 18 hours a day. And in the last series I did, Boston Legal, I had, in rush hour, a two-hour commute. So add that. So no, I would not be interested in doing a series, per se.”

Shatner played out Kirk’s death in a scene in the 1996 film Star Trek Generations. “I thought about dying, my death, and this beloved character who’s going to be put to rest,” Shatner said of the scene in a 2018 interview. “How do I play it? You know there’s got to be a moment, you’re alive, and you’re going to die, now you’re alive, and now you’re going to die. There has to be a moment when we all, at that moment of death, we say, ‘Holy cats, I’m dying!’ And you’re dead. How do you treat that moment? And I think we die the way we live. If we live filled with fear, a fear of flying, a fear of leaving the village, you’ll be fearful, you’ll lose your breath, you’ll panic, and you’ll die. Or if you look forward to the next adventure, maybe you’re conscious, maybe we’re conscious when we die. Maybe, we’re aware. A lot of people believe in heaven. We’re all going to go to a lovely place and see somebody. I don’t know what age we see our mother and father. Are they still old? Or are they young? We don’t know. That would be a lovely thing to happen, but we don’t know. It’s how we die that’s interesting. And I think we die the way we live.”