Australian Dr Chris Boshuizen will join Star Trek’s William Shatner at Blue Origin rocket launch

A Sydney man will join Star Trek actor William Shatner when they fly into space on Amazon billionaire’s Jeff Bezos’s spacecraft.

A former Sydney NASA engineer is joining Hollywood royalty when he flies into space next week in a rocket built by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s space travel company.

Set to become the third Australian to travel into space, Dr Chris Boshuizen will be part of a four-person crew aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard launch vehicle on the flight.

Dr Boshuizen has worked at NASA’s Ames Research Centre, where he helped develop a program that turned a smartphone into a satellite, before co-founding Planet Labs, which has sent more than 450 mini camera satellites into orbit.

Accompanying him on the joy flight is Star Trek actor William Shatner, who will become the oldest person to go to space.

“I’ve heard about space for a long time now,” Shatner said in a statement. “I’m taking the opportunity to see it for myself. What a miracle.”

Shatner is well known for his role as the USS Starship Enterprise’s commander for three seasons, from 1966 to 1969.

He also played Captain Kirk in seven movies, one of which he directed. He’s currently the host and executive producer of a History Channel show, The Unexplained.

William Shatner, who starred as Captain James T. Kirk in the original Star Trek series, will fly to space Picture: AFP

However, unlike the screens, the actual voyage to space will be far shorter.

The flight will last just 10 minutes and reach no higher than about 106 kilometres. The capsule will parachute back to the desert floor, not far from where it took off.

Also joining the flight is Blue Origin’s vice president of mission and flight operations Audrey Powers and Medidata co-founder Glen De Vries.

This will be Blue Origin’s second launch this year.

Bezos was on the debut flight in July and was joined by his brother, an 18-year-old man from the Netherlands and 82-year-old aviation pioneer Wally Funk, hen the youngest and oldest people to travel to space.

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos and British billionaire Richard Branson. Picture: AFP

But it’s not the first or last flight scheduled for space.

In the emerging and controversial space tourism market, Blue Origin and its New Shepard rocket is in competition with SpaceX and Virgin Galactic.

In July, Virgin Galactic carried founder Richard Branson to the edge of space with five others.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched its first private crew last month, which included a Pennsylvanian entrepreneur who bought the three-day flight and took along two contest winners and a cancer survivor.

It comes as more than 20 current and former Blue Origin employees accused Bezos’s company of having a toxic environment and not adhering to proper safety protocols.

However, the claims were firmly rejected by the company who said it doesn’t tolerate harassment or discrimination and stood by its safety record.