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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.'" | ||||||||
| OLDIE | Obviously a new take on "transporting." | |||||||
| dogcrew5369 | It would be pretty cool if Crew-2 would name their ship Enterprise after this revelation. | |||||||
| SpaceAholic | In a glimpse of a gloriously rule-breaking future, contraband has boldly gone where more is sure to follow: Space, the Final Smuggling Frontier. On Christmas day, we learned that the ashes of James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty in the original "Star Trek" series and several movies, were surreptitiously brought to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2008. For fans of the classic science fiction franchise, it was a fitting extraterrestrial resting place for the man who played a beloved character. For those with dreams of a free life beyond Earth's gravity, though, it was also a hint that the roguish spirit of Han Solo and Malcolm Reynolds has already taken root in humanity's ventures into space. | |||||||
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