The actor William Shatner said he couldn't stop crying after his flight to space with Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin last year because he was thinking about how Earth was getting destroyed by the climate crisis.
Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk in the "Star Trek" franchise, was one of four people aboard the New Shepard rocket that successfully launched into space for 11 minutes last October.
The actor told CNN Business on Saturday that he couldn't stop crying after the spaceflight.
"It took me hours to understand what it was, why I was weeping," he said. "I realized I was in grief. I was grieving for the destruction of the Earth."
Speaking about the environmental crisis, Shatner added: "It's gonna get worse! It's like somebody owing money on a mortgage, and they don't have the payments and they think, 'Oh well, let's go to dinner and not think about it.'"
During the spaceflight, Shatner and the mission's three other passengers — the former NASA engineer Chris Boshuizen, healthcare entrepreneur Glen de Vries, and Blue Origin executive Audrey Powers — experienced three minutes of weightlessness and saw the curvature of Earth.
Upon landing, a visibly emotional Shatner told Bezos, who founded Blue Origin, that he hoped he would "never recover from this."
"I am so filled with emotion about what just happened. It's extraordinary," Shatner said at the time.
Shatner, who was 90 at the time, became the oldest person to ever reach space.
