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[i]"It was completely clandestine," said Richard Garriott, a video game entrepreneur who smuggled James Doohan's ashes on to the ISS in 2008 during a 12-day mission as a private astronaut. "His family were very pleased that the ashes made it up there but we were all disappointed we didn't get to talk about it publicly for so long. Now enough time has passed that we can," he told The Times... In 2007, some of his ashes were flown briefly to the edge of space on a suborbital rocket before parachuting back to Earth and being lost for three weeks on a mountainside. In 2008 a sample destined for orbit was destroyed when the rocket failed. Anxious to fulfill his father's request to be laid to rest among the stars, Doohan's son, Chris, contacted Mr. Garriott, a millionaire adventurer who holds American and British citizenship and is the son of the late astronaut Owen Garriott. When he got the call Mr. Garriott was days from launching to the ISS on a Russian Soyuz capsule for a $30 million odyssey brokered by Space Adventures, a company he co-founded. "I said 'I'm in quarantine in Kazakhstan... but if you can get the ashes to me, I'll find a way of getting them aboard.' A couple of days before flight, this package arrived and I made a plan," Mr. Garriott said. He printed three cards bearing a photograph of Doohan, laminated them with a sprinkling of ashes sealed inside and tucked them inside his flight data file. The file had clearance to fly; the cards with the ashes did not, potentially placing Mr. Garriott in what Scotty might have termed "a wee bit of trouble" with the Russian and US space agencies. "Everything that officially goes on board is logged, inspected and bagged — there's a process, but there was no time to put it through that process," he said. "The concern afterwards was that it could disrupt relations because I didn't have permission... so in an abundance of caution I was asked to tell the family 'Let's not make a big deal out of it publicly.'"[/i]
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