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NASA Honors William Shatner With Distinguished Public Service Medal
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Red Orbit reports that after nearly 50 years of warping across galaxies and saving the universe from a variety of alien threats and celestial disasters, Star Trek's William Shatner was honored with NASA's Distinguished Public Service medal, the highest award bestowed by the agency to non-government personnel. 'William Shatner has been so generous with his time and energy in encouraging students to study science and math, and for inspiring generations of explorers, including many of the astronauts and engineers who are a part of NASA today,' said David Weaver, NASA's associate administrator for the Office of Communications at NASA Headquarters in Washington. 'He's most deserving of this prestigious award.' Past recipients of the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal include astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory director and Voyager project scientist Edward Stone, theoretical physicist and astronomer Lyman Spitzer, and science fiction writer Robert Heinlein. The award is presented to those who 'have personally made a contribution representing substantial progress to the NASA mission. The contribution must be so extraordinary that other forms of recognition would be inadequate.'"
In my day, we had to reverse the polarity of the signaling array while jettisoning the warp core!
While walking uphill in holographic snow for zero net distance but 16 kilometers worth of grueling exercise!
Then the Vulcan chef gave us a pot with some kind of flesh-eating sunflower that we had to fight and kill ourselves for dinner, using nothing but a double-axis Andorian spork!
Not to take anything away from Shatner but it was James Doohan (Scotty, for the whippersnappers out there) who inspired a lot of people to become engineers. Shatner was more the alpha-male-chasing-the-girls type.
SPOCK! duh!
I haven't heard of Shatner doing anything besides acting alpha male in TV and some Movies. The creator/writer of Trek deserves far far more credit.
Nimoy, has at least done voice overs for many TV shows that were real science shows over the decades. He also helped keep the movies going (not that the movies were inspirational... but they kept things alive before TNG got started up which may not have happened otherwise.)
Scotty also deserves more than Shatner, for getting people to be engineers. He even has a term named after him which any wise engineer uses ("The Scotty Principle.") But perhaps that keeps NASA away from him (plus he is dead.)
Although Nimoy's blessing on the disgraceful reboot... that shouldn't be overlooked; perhaps that cost him the honor? maybe it should?
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