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William Shatner was brought back down to Earth Thursday, admitting that he is “stiff and sore” from his historic rocket trip to the edge of space.
The “Star Trek” actor told the “Today” show that before Wednesday’s Blue Origin flight he kidded himself that he was like a younger man, saying, “I’m not 90, I ride horses.”
But “the whole physical experience of mounting that gantry, of getting into that chair, of being weightless, of having 5Gs” proved a reality check in his space flight, he said, adding he feared the gravitational force would prove too much for him.
“And suddenly, as I’m coming down, I’m thinking, ‘You know something — I’m 90 years old!” he admitted.
Even when the g-force was only at 2G, Shatner said he “couldn’t raise my hand — and that’s not just being 90,” he quipped.
“At 5Gs, everything is just being pressed, and you think, ‘How long can I take this?’” he said, noting the difficult stretch was luckily “over in an instant.”
Even after extensive training in simulators, “the actual feeling of weightlessness is indescribable,” Shatner told the NBC show.
“You’re floating. And I don’t want to turn to certain somersaults, I don’t want to throw Skittles — I want to look out the window!” he said, laughing at the “incredible” experience that “overwhelmed’ him.
Shatner said the trip made him realize that Earth is “so fragile” — as, it seems too is his aging body.
“You’re in and out of those chairs using muscles — and in this case, 90-year-old muscles that are unaccustomed” to such activity, he said.
“I am stiff and sore and I ache,” he said.
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