William Shatner Is 90. Is Space Travel Even Safe for Him?

After dropping hints a couple of weeks ago, William Shatner confirmed Monday that he’s heading up into space on Oct. 12 on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket—making him, at the age of 90, the oldest individual to ever go into space.

Shatner has the spunk of a person many years younger—he was doling out insults on Twitter right after the announcement—however traveling into space comes with some physical stress. So even if Shatner is in great shape for his advanced age, is it actually safe for him to leave the planet?

New Shepard flights aren’t your classic journey into space—they’re “suborbital” flights that take you below the threshold where one starts to orbit the Earth. These missions shoot up to only about 66 miles high. Passengers spend just a few minutes in weightlessness (though the view of Earth is unparalleled), before the capsule heads back to Earth and parachute lands in the desert. It’s far from the journey into space that NASA astronauts have needed “the right stuff” to complete.

However while the risks are a lot lower than a typical journey into space, this is nonetheless no cakewalk. New Shepard passengers experience g-forces of as much as 6 g vertically, with the brunt of pressure felt in their head and torso. That’s greater than the average roller coaster, and it’s fairly well-documented that many individuals will feel tunnel vision and potential blackout at even 4 or 5 g vertically. The body begins to change and experience something radically different from what it’s used to as soon as those rocket engines fire up.

Dr. Emmanuel Urquieta, a professor of space medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, informed The Daily Beast there are two major systems that undergo changes during spaceflight. The first is the cardiovascular system, because all the fluid in the body begins to shift around. Blood moves away from the legs and is pulled up into the cheek and neck. “You’re feeling like your head has been flushed abruptly, like a massive sinus issue,” he stated. For a brief flight like the one Shatner is going on, there should be almost nothing beyond minor issues that come up, however it’s not easy to predict how some bodies will react.

The second is the sensory motor system. The biggest issue is likely motion sickness—without gravity to keep you upright and with the jostling and pressures on the body created by a super-fast journey into space, it’s easy for the body to lose its lunch. That is especially true when the spacecraft’s engines shut off abruptly and the crew all of a sudden stops accelerating through at g-forces.

Urquieta stated that from a general perspective, these are the 2 systems doctors need to pay attention to for anyone going into space, “particularly for an older population.” The dangers of underlying conditions like heart arrhythmias or inner-ear problems go up with age.

At least from the outside, Urquieta doesn’t think there’s anything that would suggest Shatner has something to worry about. In public, Shatner appears about as healthy as a 90-year-old could possibly be. A misdiagnosis of prostate cancer in 2016 was his most high-profile health scare.

Urquieta emphasized that all these new spaceflight companies like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic have their own medical screening to make sure only healthy individuals are going up. “There’s no standardized medical criteria for screening spaceflight prospects,” he stated. “The Federal Aviation Administration just has general guidance that it issues.”

And finally, we just don’t have a whole lot of experience with older folks going into space. Shatner will be eight years older than aviation pioneer Wally Funk, who went up into space along with Jeff Bezos in July, however she went up and came back without a single hiccup as a result of her age. “I loved every minute of it,” she informed reporters after she came back to Earth. Before Funk, the oldest individual to ever go into space was John Glenn, at age 77 in 1998.