Megan Garber - Megan Garber is a staff writer at The Atlantic. She was formerly an assistant editor at the Nieman Journalism Lab, where she wrote about innovations in the media.

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The Day William Shatner Tweeted at an Astronaut (and the Astronaut Replied)

By Megan Garber

Jan 3 2013, 6:32 PM ET Comment

That day, my friends, is today.

@williamshatner Yes, Standard Orbit, Captain. And we're detecting signs of life on the surface.
-- Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) January 3, 2013

So this just happened:

William Shatner, he of Priceline and also of spoken-word poetry but mostly of Star Trek, is also William Shatner of Twitter. And this afternoon, the actor took to the service to ask a question of the Canadian Space Agency's Chris Hadfield, who is currently serving as the International Space Station's Flight Engineer for Expedition 34 -- and who has indeed been tweeting from space:

@cmdr_hadfield Are you tweeting from space? MBB
-- William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) January 3, 2013

Hadfield's glorious reply to this glorious question is above. And there really is not much more to be said about the matter. Except that, basically, a fake starship captain just sent a tweet to a real-life space station engineer, who replied using the language of the fake starship captain ... and all of us got to see it. And then retweet it. And then make lame-but-awesome Star Trek-related jokes about it. MBB: What a world.

Hat tip Chris Heller.