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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

With all respect to Shatner (first canadian space tourist iirc) I dont take much from these narratives. A rich/famous/connected person does a thing that we all want to do but cannot afford, something that requires insane amounts of energy/pollution. Then they turn around and talk of the profound experience and how it has made them a better person. Big deal. The pubic good is limited to a few interviews and an article in variety. Next time go meditate at a monestary. These adventures require so much energy that they will only ever be availible to an elite nanopercent of the population. Enough with famous millionaires. They should have sent a poet.

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Shatner is an actor famously known for staring in star trek which famously uses many of Shakespeare, the most well known bard, themes or outright plots. Further, he's stared in Shakespeare live productions. Even more, so he's made several spoken word lyrical albums.

Some of his words immediately after landing are poetic, “I hope I never recover, that I can maintain what I feel now.”

They did send a poet.

All in the past. Find and send the next young shatner so that the experience can inform all his work, not just his last few years.

lmao oh so send a poet but not that poet a different poet who is younger because...

Dont you think that once space flight has been more normalized there will be a whole slew of young poets who do exactly what you describe?

>>These adventures require so much energy that they will only ever be availible to an elite nanopercent of the population

The cost of launching to space has declined by orders of magnitude over the last 50 years and can be expected to decline by orders of magnitude more in the coming decades.

At one point, air travel was reserved for the richest of the rich, and today hundreds of millions of people fly every year. There's no reason the same couldn't happen with space flight.

One could say that air travel is much cheaper than it should be, if airlines or fossil fuel companies had to pull those greenhouse gases back out of the atmosphere. Getting to space is even more GHG-intensive, orders of magnitude more for orbital flight.

(also, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29062022/space-tourism-cl...)

But Shatner is an actor? I'm not sure I agree with the implication that one type of artist is better to send than another but I do agree that maybe we should consider the frivolous waste of sending people to space for joyrides when the cost is so high.

> but I do agree that maybe we should consider the frivolous waste of sending people to space for joyrides when the cost is so high.

Commercial space operations are sending celebrities to space because its seen as a wothwhile promotional expense. “We“, except to the extent that refers to the owners of these operations, aren’t involved.

Have you looked i to how much government support is behind these projects? Setting aside any tax breaks, have you looked into the amount of restricted/classified tech involved? These ventures are not possible without massive government participation.

Was an actor. He is in his eighties. His best days as an artist/writer (tekwar) are in the past.

He is 91 actually, and still does alot of funny TV and YouTube bits. I enjoy him as much now as in the past.

>>I do agree that maybe we should consider the frivolous waste of sending people to space for joyrides when the cost is so high.

Each manned space orbital launch has massive spin-off benefits, and brings forward the day when space flight is accessible to the masses.

>> But Shatner is an actor?

And a singer! Who sang about space!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lul-Y8vSr0I

There's no pollution. New Shepard uses liquid hydrogen and oxygen for fuel, which makes water. No hydrocarbons involved in the launch itself.

Fire != Pollution

Where did the hydrogen come from? What powered the machine making the lox? Every watt of energy used by a tourist rocket could be better used reducing emissions elsewhere.

Shatner (fattest person to have ever gone to space)

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