William Shatner honored with NASA’s highest civilian award

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Science! By Graham Templeton Apr. 30, 2014 7:29 am
You might roll your eyes, but this week’s honoring of William Shatner by NASA is a savvy and appropriate decision. Shatner received the agency’s highest honor for non-employees, the Distinguished Public Service Medal, in a ceremony that highlighted his career promoting science and science fiction.
I certainly don’t want to overplay the extent to which an actor is responsible for the content of*Star Trek, or to give too much credit for a cooky performance, but William Shatner has spent his entire career since then pushing hard on the space celebrity angle. He deserves this honor as much as anyone who didn’t actually work on the projects.
By contrast, look at Patrick Stewart. Though he portrayed objectively the best Star Trek captain (any dissent on this will be deleted from the comments and attacked with Heartbleed exploits!), the face of Picard has gone on record as being annoyed by his own sci-fi success. Trained as a classical British actor, he’d like to be better known for his Shakespeare than for his Professor X. William Shatner, on the other hand, has gone out of his way to continue the association with Star Trek‘s audience. He narrates or hosts space-themed television and has remained eager to help smaller sci-fi outings. For example, he donated his time to narrate NASA’s own documentary.
Below, Shatner narrates Curiosity’s entrance to the Martian atmosphere.
And, of course, there’s*Star Trek itself. Probably the single most important factor in Shatner’s winning this award is the sheer number of NASA employees who can trace their interest in space to Shatner and the original Star Trek.
One thing about Shatner’s Enterprise is that it was setting out into a truly unknown area of space. Unlike Picard’s ship, which trudged about the socio-political landscape of the 24th century, Kirk’s Enterprise was continually passing the edge of known space. More than any other iteration of the show, it focused on Roddenberry’s love of space as the, well, final frontier.
It’s his status as the face of that explorer’s philosophy that made Shatner a natural choice for this award. The citation reads: ““For outstanding generosity and dedication to inspiring new generations of explorers around the world, and for unwavering support for NASA and its missions of discovery.”*NASA presented it at his annual Hollywood Charity Horse Show, which he helps put on for several children’s causes.



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