William Shatner, who, as everyone reading Boing Boing knows, played Captain James Tiberius 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 today. From the NASA description:
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.
