Beam me up, Scottie!

If this blog had music, it would now be playing Reach for the stars. As of the last couple of years, it has become possible to shoot your ashes to outer space in a rocket. What an exciting, stellar way to go.

You don't go up in your urn strapped in like the little dog or monkey of early space exploration. In fact only a gram or so of your earthly remains get to go on the journey. You do it in company with several hundred other people's remains on a commercial space launch. If you're planning on going quite soon, you might be in time to beam up with actor James Doohan, better known as Star Trek's Scottie. He's off and up this spring on The Explorer flight, the sixth space shot to carry ashes.

Even if you decide this is the thing for you, you still have a lot of choices to make. I'm beginning to think that to organize a good funeral you probably need to like shopping because there are so many consumer choices.

The company that organizes rockets is called Celestis and at the bottom end of the market your celestial send off can cost from as little as £400. According to their website, you can choose the Earth Return service. In this option, the ashes go out to space and come back to you (with a certificate to prove where they have been.) Or there's the Earth Orbit service. The spacecraft is placed in earth orbit and may stay there for anything between 10 and 240 years before it re enters the atmosphere "vaporizing like a blazing shooting star in final tribute." You can choose to go into Lunar Orbit (starting price $12,400) or the Voyager service which takes you into deepest space (starting 2009.)

If you send a gram of ashes, the price is of course less than if you send the maximum 7 grams. Those left behind get a video of the event. And they can, if they want, go to the rocket launch for themselves. All this can be organized through the British agent Heavens Above Fireworks.

I think this send off might well appeal to a lot of baby boomers who remember sitting up all night to see Apollo 11. Space exploration has always seemed fantastic and dreamy and an astonishing achievement so it does feel like a fitting end for someone of an adventurous nature. On the Celestis website, you can scroll through a list of those going on each flight and there's a brief biog and tribute to each. It gave me a shiver of excitement as I envisaged all these folk as astronauts. It gave them the aura of heroes. I think it will catch on.