When your space-obsessed loved ones die, you can spend $3,500 to send their cremated remains out into orbit. That price only get you a couple laps of the Earth, though — after that, you’ll have to go pick their urn back up from wherever the launch capsule splashes back down in the ocean. Unless, of course, your loved one was on a rocket that launched out of California last week, which crashed on splashdown and dispersed all its ashes across the bottom of the sea.
The spaceflight, ironically called Perseverance, was launched by a space-funeral company called Celestis. It carried the “ashes and DNA” of 166 people, according to a statement from the company’s CEO, which have now been spread across the Pacific Ocean after a malfunction caused the recovery capsule’s parachute to fail. It just goes to show: The cost-benefit analysis on sending a dead loved one to merely visit space is simply not worth it.
There are better options
The Perseverance flight reentered as part of Celestis’ “Earth Rise” offering, which sends remains to hang out in space for a little bit before coming back down. It doesn’t even spread ashes in orbit, or burn them up on reentry — it’s just a little vacation to space before you still have to shell out for a regular funeral. The Chicago Sun-Times spoke with someone who sent his father’s remains on the Perseverance flight, who even clarified that “they take only a small part of the remains.” What’s the point of that?
If you’re going to send someone’s ashes to space, do it right. Shell out for the next tier up from Celestis, the “Earth Orbit” package, which burns your relative’s ashes up on reentry. That’s an extremely cool service, and while it’s more expensive than the return flight, it’s still cheaper than the average American funeral. When I am inevitably killed doing something dumb on the job in such a way that Jalopnik is forced to fund my funeral, this is the package I’m expecting — send me to dissolve on atmospheric entry. In fact, I will haunt the hell out of the editors if this doesn’t happen.
For the 166 families who placed remains on the Perseverance flight, the loss of those remains is likely tragic — though perhaps not as tragic as it could be, given that they still have most of their family member’s remains at home. Maybe, though, it’s a blessing in disguise for some of them. Before the days of reusable rockets, spacecraft fell to the sea just like these remains did. In a way, this is the truest spaceflight funeral of them all.
