Captain Kirk really was beamed up to space last week when astronauts living on board the International Space Station enjoyed a movie night - appropriately watching the new Star Trek film which was wired up to them from Nasa headquarters on earth.

The station’s resident Trekkie, American astronaut Michael Barratt, had specifically requested the film after realising that orbiting the earth in a space module was the perfect environment to watch the early adventures of Captain Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the rest of the crew on board the Starship Enterprise.

Nasa spent five hours re-formatting the blockbuster movie, which is currently No1 at the UK and US box office, to enable it to be beamed up from Mission Control to the space station, floating about 220 miles above the surface of earth.

Movie nights on board the space station are tradition, according to Nasa, but while in homes across the world people regularly snuggle up on the living room sofa and snack on pizza to watch a DVD, the astronauts in space watched the blockbuster in a rather different style.

After dinner on Friday Mr Barratt, along with Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, and Koichi Wakata from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, settled into the node of the spaceship, strapped their feet to the floor to stop them floating during the screening and watched the specially-adapted film on a computer

Mr Barratt said that the original series had inspired him to become an astronaut.

“Star Trek blended adventure, discovery, intelligence and storytelling that assumes a positive future for humanity,” he said in a statement. “The International Space Station is a real step in that direction, with many nations sharing in an adventure the world can be proud of.”

Nasa spokeswoman Nicole Cloutier told the New York Times that the trio often had to go all day without seeing each other, so a regular movie night “is a good chance to get together”.

Meanwhile elsewhere in space the astronauts from the shuttle Atlantis performed their fourth space walk in a week as part of their repairs on the Hubble Space Telescope.

US astronauts Mike Massimino and Mike Good surgically repaired a spectrograph that identifies super massive black holes in was considered by NASA to be the most intricate spacewalk of the 11-day Atlantis mission.

Hubble will remain anchored in the Atlantis payload bay until Tuesday. So far, refurbishments include the installations of two new science instruments, a data management computer as well as gyroscopes and batteries to sustain the pointing and power systems.

The Atlantis mission is considered extra risky because Hubble circles Earth at a higher orbit than the International Space Station, making the telescope and the shuttle more susceptible to collisions with space junk. It is due to conclude Friday with a landing at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida.

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