STS-133 "Star Trek" Wakeup Call

William Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk on the original Star Trek television series, provided a special message to the crew of space shuttle Discovery during the Flight Day 12 wakeup call.

As Alexander Courage's theme song played underneath, Shatner replaced the original television introduction with, "Space, the final frontier. These have been the voyages of the Space Shuttle Discovery. Her 30 year mission: To seek out new science. To build new outposts. To bring nations together on the final frontier. To boldly go, and do, what no spacecraft has done before."

The "Theme from Star Trek" received the second most votes in a public contest from a Top 40 list for NASA's Song Contest. The top two songs with the most votes from that list earned a slot on the list to wake Discovery's crew during its final mission. The total number of votes cast during the four-month contest for STS-133 was 2,463,774. Of that, Star Trek received 671,134 votes (27.2 percent). Shatner recorded the new, special introduction for Discovery's final voyage -- its 39th flight and 13th to the International Space Station.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• space shuttle Discovery
• sts-133
• star trek

[LickWilmerding]

Wonderful!!!! Thank you for making this - brought tears of joy and pride in these men, and brought tears of sadness that the program is ending

[hantonr]

@WaylanL Yeah, George Bush canceled the program, but remember that we had space vehicles designed for a 10 year lifetime flying for 30 years. Also, it was impossible to do major missions beyond LEO while the space shuttle was sucking down billions of dollars of NASA's budget per year. It's big, it's beautiful, but it's quite expensive.

[pacquiaovsmarquezIV]

Geez. I am around the weird part of Youtube yet again.

[worldwildwest]

Fred Flintstone meet mr Rogers

[UGuestsProductions]

@0s030 Unfortunately spacecraft thrusters can't even go close to the speed of light, so traveling to the nearest star would take at least 100 years (probably even more), and in that time you have to make sure to have a sufficient amount of food, fuel, and space inside the ship, seeing as the ship will have to become generational. Just building a ship like that would take a decade, if not more.

[gromm225]

@Skettimon well actually i live in cape canaveral, my dads worked on the shuttle and space program for over 15 years now, and i was interested in doing the same thing when i was older, but instead obama has shut down not just the shuttle but pretty much the entire space program and my parents are out of a job so yeah what obamas doing DOES effect me.

[docatomics]

...only those that succeed with the star trek thingy

~ shall have the responsibility to give this excellent spiel meaningful substance

=come let us go out and help them realize survival priority is not MAD annihilation but paying there life consumed debt back into the universe, as is depicted in Star Trek ways, migrating outwards to survive periodical extinction & divert resources away from mass suicide by war; learning & living to preserver life, introduce it to lifeless places !

[Hotchilipepprz4]

@hantonr Actually, didnt obama cancel the program. Bush said for years that he was for the space shuttle program. Either way, it should never have been shut down.

[NextLvlProductions]

0:32 Chuck Norris' lighter.

[0s030]

Anyone watch the show Enterprise? This is what NASA SHOULD be shooting. Manned deep space exploration. Build a thousand ships, man them all with a crew compliment of a thousand, and shoot for the stars. They don't come back? Oh well. People are killing each other here anyway, planets already overpopulated anyway. I would be the first to sign up to go. Is the human race really this stupid?