Finally!

 

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origins finally propelled Capt. Kirk to the edge of
space this AM. If NASA had possessed any PR brains at the time,
they'd have put him on the shuttle Enterprise for its atmospheric
flight tests, back when they had the chance. 

Not Spock. Not Han or Luke. Not Buck, or Starbuck. And not Picard or Ryker nor even Data.

Captain Kirk, bitchez!

ADDENDUM:

In comments at SiG's place on this topic , our fellow blogger John Wilder noted, in full Shatneresque delivery (mad props for that one JW, btw):

"Yup. The man...did...more...for science...than almost any actor."

I repeat my reply to that observation here:

"Let's be fair, John: The man did more for science than NASA."

WTWT.

QED

As the tagline for the animated LOTR by Ralph Bakshi went at the time:

"One fantasy is more powerful than a thousand realities."

Oh, yes it is.

And anyone who didn't wish, at least once, to be on a real bridge like that one, coming out of warp to orbit a new M-class planet in some distant quadrant of the galaxy, is dead to me, and dead as a human being. Every time one of the eleventy Star Trek TV shows or movies taps into that, they brush a contact on the battery of the human soul, and Shatner was a copper rod straight to the main power supply of that for most of his adult life. And for that, he's the best Canadian actor the USA ever produced. 

If anyone on Earth ever deserved to see the view from 80km straight up, he did.

And if Bezos and Company missed a trick anywhere, it's that he should have sent Sulu, Chekov, and Uhura up with with him. Hell, Paramount Studios would have paid for the whole mission out of petty cash.