posted 07-20-2005 11:11 AM               

Doohan died at 5:30 a.m. at his Redmond, Wash., home with his wife of 28 years, Wende, at his side, Los Angeles agent and longtime friend Steve Stevens said. The cause of death was pneumonia and Alzheimer's disease, he said.

Doohan had said farewell to public life in August 2004, a few months after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.

posted 07-20-2005 11:29 AM            

Doohan was a lovely guy, who I had the pleasure to meet. He'd spent part of World War Two in Cheadle, very close to where I'd lived in Manchester, and had enjoyed some photos I sent him of the area as it is today. He was incredibly proud of his youngest daughter, who has only just turned five years old.

Some of you may remember, he chose to say goodbye his own way, last year, at a special "Farewell Convention." One of those who chose to attend was Neil Armstrong. He was quoted in the press at the time saying:

"I am an engineer ... and I want a Chief Engineering officer like Montgomery Scott, because I know Scotty will get the job done, and do it right. Even if I often hear him say, 'But Ceptain, I donna have enough time!' So from one old engineer to another, thanks Scotty."

And now Armstong and Doohan are even further linked by today's date.

posted 07-20-2005 02:22 PM               

As the chief engineer on the fictional Star Trek spaceship USS Enterprise, Montgomery "Scotty" Scott cut an often flustered figure.

He dealt, on a seemingly weekly basis, with the ship's overloaded reactors and damaged warp drives.

His plaintive, if somewhat unauthentic, Scottish cry - "I dannae ken if she can take any more, Captain!" - rang through the outer edges of the cosmos as Captain James T Kirk urged even more power out of the craft.

For millions of TV viewers worldwide, this low budget science fiction show was the highlight of the week and Scotty one of its best-loved characters.

posted 12-26-2020 03:14 PM               

quote:

---

Originally posted by FFrench:
...his ashes will be flown into space.

---

"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.'"

posted 01-01-2021 02:21 PM               

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.