The mission will send up to 1,000 one-gram ash vials into low Earth orbit aboard a Falcon 9 rideshare, with memorial slots priced at $249.
Shortly after scattering the ashes of a deceased family member at sea, former NASA and Blue Origin engineer Ryan Mitchell found himself wondering where they had gone. “After it was over, I started thinking: where are they now?” Mitchell told Interesting Engineering in an interview.
“You can’t track where the ashes go after scattering in the ocean.” A veteran of the space industry, he was well aware of the lower cost and greater accessibility of orbital launches in recent years. “I started thinking: is there a better way that we could do this? And then it clicked, we could launch them to space,” Mitchell said. “We already track every satellite in orbit, so that part of the problem is already solved.” Mitchell’s startup, Space Beyond, was years in the making, but it recently announced its first launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission scheduled for October 2027. Space memorials are not new. Companies such as Celestis have been offering them since the 1990s, typically at prices starting at $3,000 or more. Space Beyond’s approach is different: it plans to send one-gram vials of ashes from up to 1,000 people on a single mission, reducing the price to as low as $249 per client.Mitchell worked as a manufacturing engineer on NASA’s space shuttle program before spending almost 10 years working at Blue Origin. When he was at Blue Origin, he fell in love with the idea of democratizing access to space, he explained to IE. It is embedded in the company’s ethos, he said. The work Blue Origin did with the—now paused—New Shepard program made space accessible in ways never before possible. “When I first started my career, only the most elite professionals could become astronauts. The best of the best of the best,” Mitchell noted. “Recently, that has opened up to the rich and famous. Now, extraordinary people from all walks of life are going to space.” “But it’s not enough,” he continued. “Every day, people, the salt of the Earth, the heart of America, won’t make it to space in their lifetimes. It’s just too expensive. Space Beyond is changing that. Now, everyone can get to space. At least, in this small way.” When he was forming the mission plan for Space Beyond, Mitchell initially considered flying ashes skyward with Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rocket, which has famously flown space tourists and scientific payloads to the edge of space. However, he ultimately “decided to pursue an orbital solution to provide more longevity for our clients’ memorials.”To go to orbit, Mitchell turned to Blue Origin’s longtime rival, SpaceX, the company responsible for reducing the price of admission to orbit. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rideshare missions have drastically lowered costs for researchers and companies looking to send experimental payloads to space. Space Beyond will leverage SpaceX’s lower-cost space travel and then take things a step further. The startup’s ‘Ashes to Space’ program will use a small CubeSat satellite to send the ashes of up to 1,000 people into space in a single trip. “We make space accessible by limiting the mass per client and serving many of them on a single mission,” Mitchell told IE. “We’ve also built the company from the ground up on Lean principles, scrutinizing all of our decisions and expenses to ensure that they are creating value for our clients. We keep our designs simple, our processes straightforward, and our organization small. Our intent is to make it possible for people to get to space in the most cost-effective way possible.” “It sounds cold, to treat memorialization with such engineered precision and efficiency, but that’s what it takes to make space affordable,” he continued. “Space has long been the domain of the elite—corporations, governments, and billionaires. We are making space for everyone. I’d love to be able to take living people, or even the full amount of their cremated remains. But, the fact is that space is hard, and space is expensive.”Last month, Space Beyond announced it had signed a launch services agreement with Arrow Science and Technology. The company will launch Space Beyond’s ash vials aboard a CubeSat on SpaceX’s upcoming Falcon 9 rideshare mission, Transporter-22, scheduled for October 2027.while attempting to carry the human remains and DNA of more than 70 deceased people to the Moon. Mitchell will be hoping to avoid a disastrous first mission. He claimed that he is reassured by SpaceX’s strong track record of sending payloads to orbit. “With any space flight, there is a chance of failure. The old saying goes something like ‘a satellites greatest natural predator is its launch vehicle,'” he said. “We mitigate a large portion of that risk by flying on the Falcon 9. With 610 successful missions to date, Falcon 9 is widely considered the most reliable orbital rocket ever produced,” Mitchell continued. “Even so, there remains a statistical possibility that a launch failure will occur. In the unlikely event of a failure, we offer a no-cost re-flight on the next available mission.” As for choosing Arrow Science and Technology, Mitchell noted that they have also proven their reliability, having supported the deployment of over 400 spacecraft across more than 20 launches. Together, SpaceX and Arrow will deploy Space Beyond’s ashes into a sun-synchronous orbit at approximately 550km altitude. This near-polar orbit will allow the CubeSat to circle the Earth once every 90 minutes, covering the entire globe in just over a week. According to Mitchell, “a neat aspect of SSO is that every time the spacecraft passes over a certain spot, such as a client’s home, it does it at the same solar time. That consistency and predictability provide an added level of comfort and meaning for our memorial mission.”Space Beyond’s memorials won’t stay in space forever. That first mission, scheduled for next year, will stay in orbit for up to five years. Symbolically, the ashes will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, providing a final farewell moment. “This first mission will stay in orbit for up to 5 years before naturally and safely de-orbiting, vaporizing like a shooting star on re-entry,” Mitchell said. “In addition to providing solace and fulfilling dreams for our clients and their loved ones, this first mission will also pave the way for our successive flights.” While that first mission will serve to validate future Space Beyond missions, Mitchell said the focus will very much be on his customers—the families grieving their loved ones. “To me, the most profound part of this isn’t the technology; it’s the posture of grief,” he explained. “Traditional memorials, such as a tombstone or an urn on a bookshelf, force us to look down. This invites families to look up. That psychological shift connecting a memory to the infinite rather than the finite is incredibly powerful.”Chris Young is a journalist, copywriter, blogger and tech geek at heart who’s reported on the likes of the Mobile World Congress, written for Lifehack, The Culture Trip, Flydoscope and some of the world’s biggest tech companies, including NEC and Thales, about robots, satellites and other world-changing innovations.ScienceSpace
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