Space travel has intrigued me since I was a kid. One of the best series about outer space is Star Trek. Who knew I have something in common with Amazon's Jeff Bezos, who is a Stark Trek fan, like me?

Bezos has scheduled his second civilian mission into space.  Originally, the blast-off was set for Tuesday, but high winds put the kibosh on that and the trip has to be rescheduled a day later -- for safety concerns. Does anyone care about this? I do. Projects like this illustrate we are getting closer to having commercial space flights; provided you can afford it.

William Shatner is 90 years old now. New York Times Magazine reporter John Hermann observed that older people might be more excited to see space missions because they grew up with them. But I maintain there's a good number of younger people interested in space travel, too.

Recently, two of the world's richest men, Bezos and Richard Branson (of Virgin Airlines) started to compete to send rocket ships into space. Just like Bezos, Branson also had boyhood dreams of going to space. 

Undoubtedly, it has also been a dream of the iconic TV show Star Trek's Captain Kirk to venture into space, for real.  Shatner made his debut in the science fiction masterpiece as the head navigator for the USS enterprise in 1966. He was rugged, handsome, fearless, and had a calm demeanor, very fitting for a rocketman.

Fans will always recall the monologue and haunting music of the program's intro:

"Space, the final frontier
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise
Its five-year mission
To explore strange new worlds
To seek out new life
And new civilizations                                                                                              To boldly go where no man has gone before"

Dreams keep scientists researching, inventors inventing, artists painting, and help keep us, other mere mortals, alive. Some say it is not productive to dream.  I disagree. Without dreams, we would not have achieved the scientific advances or contributions to the arts that exist today.

Before the Wright Brothers fashioned what is now the first primitive aircraft to fly over the ground, they were probably initially ridiculed. They were quoted as saying “My brother and I became seriously interested in the problem of human flight in 1899 ... We knew that men had by common consent adopted human flight as the standard of impossibility. When a man said, “It can’t be done; a man might as well try to fly,” he was understood as expressing the final limit of impossibility.”

Wednesday's flight could be a case of life imitating art (William Shatner on the New Shepard vs. Captain Kirk on the Enterprise ) Searching for new habitats appeals to me because there must be something out there that is a more civilized civilization.

The actor will surely add to his writings when he completes the mission on Wednesday. Shatner has published books on life before, during, and after Star Trek. Safe travels to Captain Kirk and the three other crew members!