Dying to go to Space? Have a Space Burial!
Ever dream of becoming an astronaut? Circling Earth, visiting the moon, exploring the vast reaches of our cosmos? Turns out, these ambitions are not so far-fetched — for the dead.
Well, at least symbolically. In what is called a space burial or memorial service, a small portion of the deceased’s ashes can be packed into a designated craft and sent to space. Depending on the mission, these might return to Earth to be kept by the family, but can also circle our planet for some time, land on the moon, or be shot out into deep space as distant representatives of humanity’s existence.
The idea sounds bonkers, but it’s been around for a while. Excluding the nineteen deaths that have occurred during manned spaceflight, the first intentional space burial involved a 1992 flight of Space Shuttle Columbia carrying a portion of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s ashes. Roddenberry’s remains would also be a part of the first private space burial flight five years later, when the company Celestis launched 24 people’s ashes, including those of Roddenberry and psychologist Timothy Leary, into Low Earth Orbit (LEO) aboard a Pegasus rocket. Since then, Celestis has completed eighteen memorial flights (though not all successful) and has many more planned; the company’s success in the emerging field led to the founding of several other companies offering similar services.
The viability of the concept stems partly from the expenses of traditional funerals. According to a 2021 study by the National Funeral Directors Association, a traditional funeral — including a viewing and burial — would set the family back by a median cost of $7,848 in the US. Exchanging the burial for cremation knocks it down to $6,790; both prices are up 6.6% and 11.3% from 2016, respectively. As detailed here, opting for direct cremation — no service, just the processing of remains — can cost as (comparatively) little as $1,000. It therefore comes as no surprise that cremations are on the rise. Meanwhile, space launch costs are falling — drastically.
There’s also the topic of tradition itself, and how customs have changed over time. As noted here, cremation was once unthinkable in the funerary traditions of several religions and cultures, and customs are still constantly evolving. According to Simplicity Cremations spokesman Mark Hull, ‘people now have many modern choices and they are less likely to be bound by the social ties to tradition’; he states that especially older generations gravitate towards nontraditional routes ‘partly because of practical reasons such as cost and the need for upkeep, but also because they believe their friends or loved ones don’t need a physical memorial to remember them in the same way as before’.
This philosophy then leads to more out-of-the-box ways of memorialization, which can include a venture to space; John Troyer, director of the Center for Death and Society at University of Bath, states that ‘if you make it available, people will do it, because it’s just one way to try to make it more meaningful or certainly different in a way… don’t ever downplay the cool factor of it’. Younger generations are a little trickier to gauge in this respect; as detailed here, they seem to be all about creative funerals, but also place much value on environmentally-sound methods, which space launches are not exactly known for.
But as traditional funerals become impractical and their prices rise — and space launches become cheaper — cosmic burials suddenly don’t seem so bizarre. The booming commercial space industry, especially that of the US, has enabled companies like Celestis and its competitors to offer dramatically low prices for their services, especially given their light payload of only a few grams of ashes plus their hardware. This also means that their environmental impact is not as high as one might think; memorial missions launch as secondary payloads, meaning that they hitch a ride on another mission scheduled to launch anyway. But it is especially the cultural shifts that are making their mark on the industry, according to Celestis’ founder and CEO Charles Chafer; ‘the pace is accelerating as the trends are accelerating’, he says, and as a result, space burials are growing in popularity.
Celestis’s cheapest package — Earth Rise — is priced at $2,995 and involves a suborbital hop ‘exceeding 100 kilometers’ to the edge of space, enough for a gram of remains to briefly experience zero gravity before it is returned to the family as a keepsake. Launching aboard a suborbital rocket like the UP Aerospace SpaceLoft XL, these missions carry several dozen to hundreds of remains samples. An almost identical service is offered by the younger company Beyond Burials, who offer their Starlight Memorial package for $1,500: a significantly more affordable option than some funerals. While Celestis has only one such flight scheduled for 2023, Beyond aims to offer these trips several times a year, which could explain the difference in price. Both services also include a professionally edited video of onboard footage.
An alternative is presented by UK company Aura Flights; their specialty is using a hydrogen-filled balloon to lift the entirety of one’s ashes to an altitude of about 32 kilometers and scattering them from there. After about 6 months, the company claims, the remains ‘descend into the upper atmosphere, mingle with pockets of water vapour, and finally return to the Earth as raindrops and snowflakes’; since 2017, Aura has conducted over 250 of these scatterings. Despite the substantially larger payload than the single gram of remains carried by Celestis and Beyond, the use of balloons — which come much cheaper than rockets — and lower altitude make for a relatively affordable pricetag of about $3,534. Again, a video of the flight is included in the package.
Deeper pockets are required for those wishing to exit Earth’s atmosphere. Celestis’s $4,995 Earth Orbit service and Beyond’s $2,500 Shooting Star Memorial both offer launches of about a gram of remains into orbit; Beyond aims to launch several times a year aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, while Celestis has two launches planned for 2023, also on the Falcon 9. Exact orbits vary based on the mission of the primary payload, but in both cases, all remains are kept inside a designated spacecraft. Depending on its trajectory, this then deorbits over months or years, eventually burning up in the atmosphere — hence the Beyond package’s name. In addition to a memorial video, family members can track the spacecraft’s location and learn where it will reenter the atmosphere. For bigger payloads, Japanese company Space NTK offers orbital launches of an egg-sized pile of remains for about $4,053, while also advertising the launch of a person’s entire remains for about $56,726.
If Earth’s orbit is still too close to home, how does the moon sound? A lunar burial has only been done once before; during Celestis’s 1998 Luna-01 mission, NASA’s Lunar Prospector probe carried a portion of planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker’s remains. The spacecraft deliberately crashed into the moon’s Shoemaker Crater in 1999, burying its passenger with it. Both Celestis and Beyond offer lunar packages, their services priced at $12,995 and $7,500 respectively. This time, remains should have a much gentler landing as they would hitchhike on lunar lander missions — Celestis’s upcoming Tranquility flight will fly aboard Astrobotic’s Peregrine Lander, for example — and then be deposited on the moon’s surface.
But if you fancy a complete change of scenery and want to leave the Earth-Moon system in the dust, Celestis’s $12,995 Voyager package or Beyond’s $7,500 Milky Way Memorial might be for you. As their names suggest, these services will send remains on a trajectory far beyond the moon, though destinations vary depending on the primary payload. There won’t be much company; these distant missions are few and far between. In May 2023, however, Celestis will launch space burial veteran Roddenberry’s remains — along with those of his wife and around 150 other people — into interplanetary space as part of its Enterprise mission.
Space burials seem a rather niche affair, and indeed, many of the deceased that fly in them harbored lifelong passions for spaceflight. For example, family members of Alfred Floyd Turner, whose remains flew on the 2007 Celestis Legacy flight, stated that it was ‘always his dream to fly into space’, and that he even built a spaceship in his basement. Another passenger on the flight, Thomas W. Heide, was described by his family as having a similar dream, even having gone to space academy. Such sentiments continue to emanate throughout Celestis’s missions, including its most recent.
But CEO Chafer is aiming for a broader market. ‘Obviously everyone dies — at least today that’s true — therefore you have a global market’, he says. And the concept, he argued in 2016, appeals to a wider audience than just the space freaks. Of the over 1,000 remains launched as of that year, typical customers ‘are people who step out at night and look at the stars, and they say, “I want to be a part of that” … people want something special, something that says something about who they were and what they believed in’. Space, after all, hangs over everyone’s heads; it doesn’t get much more universal than that.
For the living, the process provides a ‘kind of closure’, as mentioned by Heide’s family after his flight. Chafer agrees, describing the excitement of the three-day launch event: ‘you don’t see many memorials where there’s as much cheering at the launch’. Still, choosing a space burial is not always a grand poetic gesture; other strong motivating factors include the low costs and even environmental protection, so Chafer.
Speaking of which, just how adversely do space burials affect the environment, or worsen the growing issue of space debris? Aura Flights states that it takes care to use biodegradable balloons, sustainable fuel, and a reusable capsule; it also claims that the ash released into the atmosphere will disperse to the point that only a ‘microscopic amount’ will settle in a given place. If accurate, this would make the method environmentally friendlier than scattering the remains in just one area — but being a niche concept, not much research on the subject exists.
In terms of debris, orbital burial missions are tracked and attached to spacecraft or rocket stages. Celestis states that their ‘missions are carefully designed to ensure that no orbital debris or adverse environmental effects occur in space or on planet Earth’ and that the actual ashes do not leave the spacecraft, but do not mention whether these can maneuver to avoid preexisting debris; a collision would result in the creation of innumerable new pieces of junk. Beyond Burials are even vaguer in their policy.
But in space, there’s more than one kind of pollution; in a pristine environment mostly untouched by human hand, even a small presence of earthly DNA or microbes can mess with scientific expeditions and the search for life beyond our world. NASA’s Cassini probe, for example, intentionally plummeted into the inhospitable Saturn to avoid it crashing on one of the gas giant’s moons such as Titan and contaminating its ‘pre-biotic chemistry’. Interplanetary missions in general are often extensively sterilized before launch to prevent microbial cross-contamination; NASA’s Curiosity rover was even forbidden by UN Space Law from investigating a potential water source as it had not been sterilized enough.
While cremation mostly destroys DNA, Celestis now offers Celestis DNA, a service that will take customers’ genetic material, including hair samples and cheek swabs, into space. The company plans to pack DNA from four US presidents onto its 2023 Enterprise mission, but theoretically, this could be sent to any location the company offers. As far as contamination goes, the moon has already seen some shit, literally — including Streptococcus mitis bacteria and human waste left there in bags — but as spaceflight capabilities expand and, say, Martian or Titanic burials and DNA deliveries become viable, a serious conundrum could arise.
But there’s an upside to these plans, too. As Celestis proudly notes on its website, sending one’s DNA into space or beaming it to a distant galaxy could help solidify humankind’s existence in the cosmos; according to the theory of panspermia, the building blocks to life on Earth were brought here by foreign asteroids or, depending on who you ask, spaceships. Celestis argues this program — as well as its Mindfiles concept, allowing one to send messages and photos across space — can result in so-called reverse panspermia and bring about the evolution of life on other worlds. As it stands now, one big blow to our planet — nuclear war, asteroid strike, severe climate change — could extinguish almost every trace of our existence, and an off-world zip-file for humanity, so to speak, gives life a tiny chance of starting anew somewhere else.
Given the infinitesimally small chances of life evolving on Earth, not to mention it happening again with the same material somewhere else, this argument might be somewhat optimistic. Besides, colonies on the moon and Mars are already in the works. But especially if it doesn’t lead to life elsewhere, asserting our existence in the cosmos is important. One day, when we’re all dead or have evolved into some barely recognizable subspecies with only an echo of humanity left, when the sun has swallowed the Earth and all the constellations have drifted apart, those little capsules might be all that’s left of mankind as it is now — a lock of hair, some ash, a faded picture. Today, sending our dead into space memorializes them; tomorrow, their cosmic journey could immortalize us.
Originally published at https://notrocketscience.substack.com on March 3, 2023.
