47 'people' head for space burial with SpaceX’s Transporter-5 mission

SpaceX’s Transporter-5 rideshare mission, launched on Wednesday (May 25), is carrying the mortal remains of 47 people for cremation in space.

This was SpaxeX’s 22nd rocket mission this year and the 18th time the company has launched a space burial flight.

The concept called “send off” — conceptualised by Celestis — has gained in popularity of late mainly because flight to space has been made possible by private companies like SpaceX.

The Transporter-5 mission took off at 2:30 p.m. EDT on Wednesday from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida (US).

The Transporter-5 mission contains several small satellites, which are packed into a single rocket, which then carries them to the sun synchronus orbit for cosmic burial.

The company, Celestis, puts the mortal remains of its customers into “roughly lipstick-sized tubes, before packing them in a small satellite for launch”, UPI.com reported.

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“These small satellites carry a bevy of human remains that orbit the planet for about a decade before they fall back to Earth and are burnt up in the atmosphere, resembling a shooting star falling back to Earth,” Charles Chafer, who founded the company, told UPI in an interview.

“When I came up with the idea [for the company], I was looking for something that could bring commercial space activities to a mass market,” Chafer said. “Obviously everyone dies — at least today that’s true — therefore you have a global market.”

Among others, the mission carries ashes of Marjorie Dufton – once the youngest female flight instructor in the US. As per media reports, Marjorie could have been a part of NASA’s Mercury 13 program, which was considering allowing women to become astronauts, but the program was disbanded before she had an opportunity to go to space.

“That was her biggest regret,” Marjorie’s son Michael Dufton told the media house. “But now she too can be amongst the stars.”

Besides, the mission carries remains of a man who had passion for astronomy, but could not fly into the space while he was alive. SpaceX is giving a chance, though posthumously, to Derek Stephen Yanes, the man who died three years ago, to fulfil his lifelong dream of reaching outer space.

SpaceX’s next memorial flight may happen next year, and the company is accepting participants.

According to Wikipedia, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is an American space manufacturer, a provider of space transportation services, and a communications corporation headquartered in Hawthorne, California. SpaceX was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the goal of reducing space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars.