Star Trek actor William Shatner has become the oldest person to reach space.

The 90-year-old blasted off from Texas at 3.50pm UK time on a Blue Origin rocket – the space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Shatner, who played Captain Kirk in the original Star Trek series, is spending several minutes in a suborbital flight alongside three others.

Before the launch, Shatner admitted he was a “little frightened”.

Live – Shatner blasts to edge of space on Amazon founder’s rocket

The 18-metre New Shepard rocket sent the quartet above the internationally-recognised boundary of space known as the Karman Line, about 62 miles (100km) up.

Shatner experienced a few minutes of weightlessness in his space trip before parachutes were expected to deliver the capsule back to Earth.

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The others on the flight are NASA engineer Chris Boshuizen, clinical research entrepreneur Glen de Vries and Blue Origin vice president and engineer Audrey Powers

Blue Origin’s reusable rocket system is called New Shepard, named after the Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard who was the first American to go into space.

The company aims to attract paying customers in future and had its maiden space tourism flight on 20 July, when Bezos and three others flew to the edge of space.

Other billionaires are also competing in the space race, notably Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

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