Jakarta –
Nearly 200 remains, including the late Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, will be part of the maiden space mission to permanently orbit the Sun as their final resting place.
This space mission will be launched by Celestis, a company from Houston, Texas, United States which has been promoting funeral services in space since 1994. It will be the first memorial space flight after nearly 30 years of waiting.
“This will be our civilization’s first and only repository in the universe, 330 million kilometers into space. No one has done that before,” said Celestis President Colby Youngblood, quoted from Cybernews.
Celestis once took part in NASA’s successful mission to deliver the cremated ashes of legendary scientist Dr. Eugene Shoemaker went to the Moon in 1998, and has completed dozens of round-trip spaceflights since then.
During the Voyager Memorial Spaceflight Mission, the company plans to deliver 196 capsules of the cremated remains of people who have died, as well as some DNA from living people.
The flight, which will launch around 2024, will carry the ashes or DNA of famous people such as sci-fi film legend and Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who died in 1991 and his wife.
Members of the Star Trek cast also took part in their final journey into space with Celestis, including James Doohan (died 2005) who played the character Scotty, and Nichelle Nichol (died 2022) who was known as a member of the USS Enterprise Uhura crew.
Instead of being ‘beamed’ into space, the privately managed flight capsule will be catapulted into the universe via the launch of an explosive rocket called the Vulcan Centaur which takes place during a three-day anniversary event at Cape Canaveral, Florida, birthplace of the American space program.
“We had hair follicles from George Washington, President Dwight Eisenhower, and President John F Kennedy. All of them were on board the flight,” Youngblood said.
Other famous people who traveled to this ‘afterlife’ include NASA’s first female astrogeologist Mareta West and astronaut L. Gordon Cooper. The Celestis flight will travel into outer space, beyond the Earth-Moon system, and through the James Webb telescope’s orbit around the Sun without limit.
Once the rocket reaches its interplanetary destination, humanity’s most distant permanent storage outpost will eventually become known as the Enterprise Station. Celestis also provides a real time tracking tool for family and friends who wish to watch over and track their loved ones while their cremated ashes or DNA are traveling deep into space.
One couple from Arizona, who also submitted their DNA on the inaugural Voyager mission, called it the “last trip” and said they liked the idea that this burial was to be “the most distant human genome from the planet.”
“We all want to be immortal in some way, and this is an opportunity for us to be able to do something no one else has done, to go where no one else has gone before,” said the couple.
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(rns/rns)
2023-07-18 03:02:31
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