Jeff Bezos Tells William Shatner How Star Trek, Paper Toys and the Moon Landing Built Blue Origin

LOS ANGELES — Jeff Bezos has told William Shatner, in the actor’s own new memoir, that the cardboard “Star Trek” toys of a Houston childhood, the books on his nightstand and the night Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon were not separate hobbies. They were the same line that later became Blue Origin.

“All those things are linked,” Bezos told Shatner. “The ten-year-old boy playing with his friends and making paper tricorders, reading all this science fiction, seeing Neil Armstrong step onto the Moon. Somehow, those things all came together and made Blue Origin.”

The exchange appears in an excerpt from “William Shatner … and You,” published Friday by Variety. Shatner, 95, uses the book to interview people who say his work changed their lives. The guest list includes Ben Stiller, Josh Groban, “Weird” Al Yankovic, Jeri Ryan, Seth MacFarlane and Jason Alexander. Bezos is the one who closed the circle in hardware. In 2021 his company flew Shatner, then 90, on a New Shepard capsule from West Texas — the man who played Capt. James T. Kirk, riding a real rocket built by a fan who once fought over who got to be Kirk.

Shatner writes that Bezos discovered “Star Trek” in 1974, in fourth grade, in a Houston suburb. After school he raced home with two friends, Dean and Kyle, to watch reruns. Then they went outside and built a starship out of furniture.

“The three of us would round up other friends and younger siblings and assign them the lesser roles,” Bezos said. “The two roles that got fought over the most were Kirk and Spock. I often played Kirk, and I often played Spock. From there, we’d work our way down. Someone would even play the computer!”

That account matches what Bezos told The Washington Post in 2016, when he described the same backyard games: cardboard phasers, cardboard tricorders, daily arguments over the bridge chairs. “Good days,” he said then.

The toys survived because his mother kept them. Before Shatner’s flight, Bezos posted photographs of the homemade communicators and tricorders. “I made these tricorders and communicator to play ‘Star Trek’ with my friends when I was 9 years old, and my incredible mom saved them for 48 years,” he wrote. Shatner carried the pieces into space as a favor. Bezos asked the public not to judge the artwork.

Blue Origin was founded in 2000, after Bezos had already built Amazon. He has said for years that the long-term aim is to move heavy industry off Earth so the planet can remain livable — a “Star Trek” future in the language of an engineer rather than a television writer. Shatner, in the new book, describes that goal as helping humanity on its journey toward the world the series imagined. The excerpt does not present a new corporate timeline. It presents a personal one: play, reading, the Moon, then a company that puts paying passengers and invited guests on a suborbital hop.

Bezos flew first. On July 20, 2021, the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, he rode New Shepard with his brother and two other passengers. Shatner wanted a seat on that first crewed flight and did not get one. He has said he later accepted a place on the second. On Oct. 13, 2021, he lifted off with Glen de Vries, Audrey Powers and Chris Boshuizen. The automated capsule reached about 66.5 miles, crossed the line often used to mark space, and parachuted back after a little more than 10 minutes.

What happened on the desert floor is now as famous as the flight. While others hugged family and opened champagne, Shatner talked to Bezos about the thin blue sheet of atmosphere and the black beyond it.

“What you have given me is the most profound experience,” he said that day. “I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now. I don’t want to lose it.”

He described the sky as a comforter that vanished in an instant. “You look down, there’s the blue down there, and the black up there,” he said. “There is Mother and Earth and comfort and there is … Is there death? I don’t know. Was that death? Is that the way death is? Whoop and it’s gone.” He added, “In an instant you go, ‘Whoa, that’s death.’ That’s what I saw.”

Bezos answered, “That’s amazing. That’s amazing.”

Shatner later wrote in “Boldly Go,” his 2022 book about the flight, that the contrast between the cold of space and the warmth of Earth filled him with “overwhelming sadness.” The trip “was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.” He identified the feeling with the overview effect described by other astronauts. In an interview with NPR he said he realized he was in grief. “I wept for the Earth because I realized it’s dying.”

The new memoir treats that day as one chapter in a longer fan story rather than as a product launch. Shatner has said the book is built around the people who watched him. “My greatest joy has been the connection I’ve shared with fans over the years,” he told PEOPLE when the project was announced. “William Shatner…And You is a celebration of them: their stories, their passion and the bond we’ve built together.” In the text he writes that he was “astonished by the complexity” of what those conversations uncovered.

The Bezos interview is the most literal version of that bond. A boy in Houston assigns the computer part to a younger sibling. Decades later he owns a rocket company and a model of the Enterprise in a lobby. The actor who sat in the original captain’s chair becomes a passenger. The paper tricorders go along for the ride.

None of that resolves the arguments that have followed billionaire spaceflight — cost, climate, whether a 10-minute hop counts as exploration. Bezos has not used the memoir excerpt to answer those criticisms. He has used it to draw a straight line from a fourth-grade rerun schedule to a launch pad in West Texas.

Shatner, closing the excerpt, puts the same line in plainer language. As a child, Bezos and his friends arranged chairs outside and pretended they were on the bridge of the Enterprise. Years later, Bezos built a rocket and took Captain Kirk with him. What comes next, Shatner writes, is bound only by imagination.

The book is on sale through Shatner’s site and Amazon. The flight it circles happened almost five years ago. The toys in the capsule were made when Bezos was 9. The television series that started the whole chain premiered in 1966. In the account Bezos gave Shatner, those dates are not trivia. They are the working parts of a single sentence: a kid playing Kirk, a man watching Armstrong, a company named for a blue planet, and an actor who finally left the set.