Launching someone's ashes into space is not a new phenomenon. The earliest "space burial" was, fittingly, of a portion of the ashes of Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek. In 1992, a year after his death, the space shuttle Columbia took some of Roddenberry's ashes on a
In 1997, an upstart company called Celestis began offering private space burial. Their initial launch included remains of two dozen people, including Roddenberry again and Timothy Leary. The rocket orbited until it reentered the Earth's atmosphere in 2002 and landed in Australia. More than an estimated 1,000 people have had portions of their remains launched into space over the last two decades, the majority of them through Celestis, but a select few on NASA missions.
Today, a portion of the remains of Clyde Tombaugh, the scientist who discovered Pluto, have easily become the human remains that have travelled the furthest in the universe. Tombaugh's remains were aboard New Horizons when it launched in 2006 and today, as the spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto, he has literally gone where no man has gone before.
Although archaeologists still debate the earliest evidence of cremation, it appears to be at least tens of thousands of years old, perhaps first occurring in Australia. Cremation has been independently invented in different places at different times, with the ancient Greeks and Romans being the first to truly popularize the practice in the Western world. There is no doubt, though, that the earliest practitioners of cremation could ever have imagined what happened today.
Space burial is open to anyone with the financial ability to select it. Maybe space travel isn't your thing? Well, should you want to do something else with the remains of your loved one or pet, you can have them made into a diamond, melded into a sustainable ocean reef, and put into fireworks.
21st century burial practices just got way more interesting.
