Ashes to Asteroids, Dust to Dust: Meet the Company Sending People’s Cremated Remains into Orbit

Ever loved someone ‘to the Moon and back’? Well, thanks to an American start-up, you can now pay to have their ashes shot into space.

Space Beyond is a vertically integrated aerospace service that is on a mission to “democratize spaceflight”. The company’s flagship offering, Ashes to Space, enables earthside customers to send a portion of their loved one’s ashes into orbit around our planet for as low as US$249.

As TechCrunch has reported, Space Beyond’s founder, Ryan Mitchell, arrived at the idea for his company at a relative’s ash-spreading ceremony. Noting the brevity of the moment, Mitchell, a manufacturing engineer with over a decade of aeronautics experience at NASA and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, resolved to “do this better” – to offer a method of memorializing loved ones that did not end in an instant, but rather continued in perpetual motion for years after their death.

While other companies have sent ashes to space in the past, what makes Space Beyond’s offering newsworthy is its uniquely low price point. Mitchell explained to TechCrunch that the company keeps costs low primarily by using a rideshare model, in which Space Beyond’s CubeSat – a small cube-shaped satellite that can carry up to 1,000 samples of ashes – hitches a ride by integrating into larger spacecraft. Once in space, the CubeSat detaches and launches into Earth’s orbit, where it will circle the loved ones of its cremated cargo for years to come. Plus, with many spacecraft tracking services already available to the public, customers will be able to locate the satellite and follow its passage above their homes.

There are some notable limitations to Space Beyond’s technology. First off, in order to maximize the capacity of the tiny CubeSat, each spot on the satellite will hold just one gram of ashes (called a “Celestial Tribute” in the company vernacular). Further, the orbit of the CubeSat will not continue indefinitely; it will orbit the Earth for roughly five years, after which time it will re-enter the atmosphere and, as happens to objects returning to Earth at hypersonic speeds, burn up into a fireball. Lastly, it bears reiterating that the satellite will never physically “spread” the ashes in space, for doing so could create debris that harms other spacecraft. Instead, the Ashes to Space program offers a kind of extended memorial, giving the deceased just a few more precious trips around the sun before their loved ones must say a final goodbye.

In January, Space Beyond announced that it had signed a launch services agreement with Arrow Science and Technology to facilitate the launch of its first CubeSat into the heavens. Enabled by Arrow, the device will attach to the SpaceX’s Falcon 9, which is scheduled to launch its next rideshare mission in October 2027.