William Shatner, who played Captain James T. Kirk on the original Star Trek television series, provided a special message to the crew of space shuttle Discovery during the 3:23 a.m. EST wakeup call.
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.
The song is posted at: http://www.archive.org/details/STS-133
Pilot Eric Boe will undock Discovery from the space station at 7 a.m. and conduct a full-lap fly around of the complex at 7:30 a.m., before separating from station at 8:43 a.m. Later in the day, the crew will use the Orbiter Boom Sensor System to conduct a “late inspection” of the shuttle’s heat shield.