The ashes of the late James Doohan, who played chief engineer Montgomery Scott in the original Star Trek television series, have been on board the International Space Station for 12 years – and the Domigo Times London has the fascinating history of how it happened. Doohan died in 2005 at the age of 85, and his family wanted to fulfill his wish to enter the ISS.
Official requests to bring Doohan’s ashes to the ISS were denied, but Richard Garriott – one of the first private citizens to travel on the space station – managed to smuggle some of Doohan’s ashes into the space station’s Columbus module. Garriott says he took a laminated photo of Doohan and some of his ashes and placed it under Columbus’ floor. He didn’t tell anyone about the scheme – only he and Doohan’s family knew until now.
“It was completely clandestine,” Garriott told the Times. “His family was very satisfied with the ashes, but we were all disappointed that we hadn’t talked about it publicly for so long. Now enough time has passed so that we can ”,
It is not the first time that Doohan’s ashes have reached the skies. Some of its ashes were on board the SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket in 2008, but the rocket failed within minutes of launch. And in 2012, an urn with some of Doohan’s ashes flew into space aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9. According to the Times, Doohan’s ashes traveled about 1.7 billion miles through space and orbited the Earth more than 70,000 times.
Doohan’s son Chris thanked Garriott for smuggling his late father’s ashes aboard the ISS. “What he did was play – it meant a lot to me, a lot to my family and it would have meant a lot to my dad,” he said.
Years after his death, Scotty is still boldly going … well, you know the rest.