Speaking of Star Trek movies, hardcore fans may recall there was a scene planned for the seventh one, Generations, in which Captain Kirk tries to relieve the boredom of his retirement years by indulging in the 23rd Century’s version of extreme sports, “orbital skydiving.” That is, he jumps out of an orbiting spacecraft and free-falls back into the atmosphere until he’s low enough to open a parachute. The scene didn’t make it into the finished film, although it appears in the novelization and comic-book adaptation; a rough version of it is available on YouTube, if you’re curious. Or masochistic. Personally, I’m glad it got cut. Not that Generations was a very good film anyway, but having that scene right in the opening moments would’ve been a disaster. The later Trek films already suffered from an excess of silliness, and this particular idea was so painfully ridiculous that audiences would’ve been in full-on MST3K mode before the credits even started rolling. Even within a framework that allows teleportation and giant starships that literally bend the fabric of spacetime, skydiving from outer space is over-the-top implausible.

Or so I’ve always thought.

In one of those really weird welcome-to-the-future moments, I’ve learned that two competing daredevils aim sometime this fall to do something very similar to what I thought even James T. Kirk could not believably do: skydive from the very edge of space back to Earth. One of them is an Austrian named Felix Baumgartner, who is fully sponsored by Red Bull and widely believed to have the best chance of succeeding; the other is a Frenchman called Michel Fournier, who is funding his own adventure and has been trying to accomplish this feat since the 1980s. Both men have similar plans: to ascend to 120,000 feet in a gigantic balloon, clad in a pressure suit, and then leap out and plummet back down to 3,000 feet before deploying a specially designed parachute. The total jump will last about 10 minutes. And here’s the really wild part: the jumpers expect to exceed 700 mph during their fall. That’s the speed of sound, if you don’t know this aeronautical stuff. No one knows what might happen to a human body breaking the sound barrier without an airplane or spacecraft around them. Possibly nothing… or it’s equally possible these guys could turn themselves into strawberry jam. Either way… a supersonic human is pretty mind-boggling.

No date has been announced for either attempt. I’ll be following this story, though…

There was an episode of the original Star Trek in which the Enterprise encounters another starship whose entire crew has been killed by an alien disease that sucked all the water from their bodies and then crystallized the remaining chemicals that comprise a living organism. The visualization of the end result was typically cheap, but reasonably effective: empty uniforms sprawled across consoles and heaped in corridors, with piles of what looks like rock salt spilling from the shirt collars and cuffs, pant legs, and boots. I think I’ve noted before that the one thing the original series had that none of the spin-offs or the recent reboot movie has managed — or even attempted — to capture was a deep sense of eeriness. Space was weird in the classic Trek series, and sometimes it was pretty damn spooky. The idea of the rock-salt disease gave me a major case of the willies when I was a kid, and those empty uniforms are an image that has stayed with me all these years.

Case in point: When I got off the train tonight at the end-of-the-line station, I noticed a little one-piece jumpsuit thingie of the sort worn by babies draped over a low fence that runs along the edge of the platform. Now, obviously what happened is that someone dropped it, and a good samaritan placed it in an obvious spot in case the owner came back looking for it. But I have to admit that for just a moment — a brief, vertiginous, irrational moment — I glanced downward, to see if there was a pile of white crystals on the ground below the jumper’s collar opening…

Man, am I a geek or what?