What Is A Space Burial?
What Is A Space Burial?
Sending a portion of cremated remains into space is known as a space burial, which can involve orbiting around the Earth, being sent further into space, or being sent to the Moon. Interestingly, the concept of launching remains into space was initially suggested by Neil R. Jones, a science fiction author, in his 1931 novella The Jameson Satellite. The idea was later featured in the 1965 movie The Loved One and was explored in a 1977 newspaper article by Richard DeGroot for the Seattle Times.
How do space burials work?
There are a few options with varying costs when it comes to space burials.
The remains are typically sealed until either the spacecraft burns up during re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere or reaches its intended extraterrestrial destination. In the case of suborbital flights, the remains are briefly transported into space before returning to Earth, where they can be retrieved. To make such services more cost-effective, small samples of remains are typically launched to minimize the amount of mass being sent into space.
What are the options for space burials?
There are four businesses that offer space burials:
- Celestis
- Elysium Space
- Aura Flights
- Beyond Burials
Each one offers different options however these can be split down into a few categories:
- Suborbital flights, which involve crossing the boundary of space without achieving orbital velocity, can be a cost-effective means of conducting a space burial. During such flights, the remains typically do not burn up and may either be recovered or lost.
- Pet Burial - Celestis introduced Celestis Pets in 2014, which is a spaceflight service for animal cremated remains. In 2012, Bismarck, a police dog from Monroe, Washington, was rumored to have flown on a memorial spaceflight. However, when this news became public, the president of Celestis stated that if dog ashes were indeed on the rocket, the person who provided the cremated remains had likely breached the terms of the contract they signed with Celestis.
- Dedicated spacecraft - Elysium Space made history on May 17, 2017, by announcing the world's first memorial flight that involved a dedicated spacecraft. This CubeSat was launched as a secondary payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of a planned dedicated rideshare mission called SSO-A by Spaceflight. The launch occurred on December 3rd, 2018, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and was successful. However, industry sources have noted that the Elysium Star spacecraft remained attached to the deployer due to a failure to obtain the appropriate licensing.
- Moon-burial - Eugene Merle Shoemaker was the first person to receive a lunar burial, as a portion of his cremated remains were transported to the Moon by NASA. Carolyn Porco, Shoemaker's former colleague and a professor at the University of Arizona, proposed and organized the tribute by having Shoemaker's ashes launched aboard NASA's Lunar Prospector spacecraft. Ten days after Shoemaker's passing, Porco received approval from NASA administrators and delivered the ashes to the Lunar Prospector Mission Director, Scott Hubbard, at the NASA Ames Research Center. The ashes were accompanied by a piece of brass foil engraved with an image of Comet Hale–Bopp, a Meteor Crater in northern Arizona, and a passage from Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. The Lunar Prospector spacecraft was launched on January 6, 1998, and impacted the south polar region of the Moon on July 31, 1999. Both Elysium Space and Celestis have proposed missions to the Moon as part of a project by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh.
