How Star Trek actor’s ashes were smuggled onto the ISS
- Ashes of James Doohan, who played Scotty, have been interred on the International Space Station since 2008
- ‘Completely clandestine’ caper was revealed by Doohan’s son this week, more than 12 years later
Scotty, the chief engineer on the fictional USS Enterprise who was always scrambling to heed the cry, “Beam me up, Scotty!” has been transported himself.
The ashes of James Doohan, the actor who portrayed the original Star Trek character Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, have been interred for a dozen years on the International Space Station (ISS). And on Monday, the backstory of how they came to be there was revealed in full.
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Doohan died in July 2005 at age 85, though his character would not be born until the 23rd century. Portions of the actor’s ashes had previously been launched into space officially a couple of other times, according to The Verge.
Citizen astronaut and entrepreneur Richard Garriott, who was one of the first private citizens to fly to space, smuggled Doohan’s ashes during a 12-day mission in 2008, he told The Times of London in a story published on Christmas Day.
The plot was conceived by son Chris Doohan.
“My dad had three passions: space, science and trains,” Chris Doohan told The Times. “He always wanted to go into space.”
His son made that happen by enlisting Garriott, a video game developer, who travelled to the ISS on a self-funded, 12-day visit via Russia’s Soyuz TMA-13 mission, according to Vulture. Garriott sprinkled ashes onto and then laminated photos of Doohan, which he then brought on board, he told The Times.
One of the cards he slipped behind the cladding on the floor of the Columbus module, another he jettisoned into space, and a third he brought back to Chris Doohan, where it hangs framed on a wall.
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“Richard said, ‘We’ve got to keep this hush-hush for a little while,’ and here we are 12 years later,” Chris Doohan told The Times. “What he did was touching – it meant so much to me, so much to my family, and it would have meant so much to my dad.”
According to The Times, Doohan’s ashes have now travelled 1.7 billion miles in space, orbiting Earth more than 70,000 times.
“It was completely clandestine,” Garriott said. “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.”
