Special Star Trek Song Beamed Up To Space Shuttle

William Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk on the original Star Trek television series, provided a very special message to the crew of space shuttle Discovery during the STS-133 Flight Day 12 wakeup call.

With strains of Alexander Courage’s famous theme song from Star Trek playing, 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 team from ReelNASA put together this video.

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 first place song was Blue Sky by Big Head Todd and the Monsters and will be the wake-up music at 3:23 a.m. Tuesday for Discovery’s final full day in space. The song is a tribute written for the first post-Columbia flight, STS-114.

Discovery undocked this morning from the ISS, and NASA TV provided spectacular views of both the shuttle backdropped by Earth and the International Space Station in its almost final configuration floating against the blackness of space. We’ll provide some images soon.

Discovery is scheduled to land at Kennedy Space Center at 11:58 am EST on Wednesday, March 9.