"Ryan Mitchell, the founder of a startup called Space Beyond, remembers looking at the night sky while camping at a state park and wondering what he should do next. A manufacturing engineer who worked on NASA's space shuttle program before spending nearly a decade at Jeff Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, Mitchell was considering his options. In those jobs, he had seen the cost to access space come down dramatically, thanks in large part to Blue Origin's rival SpaceX."
"Mitchell told TechCrunch that an idea finally clicked when he was attending a family member's ash-spreading ceremony. "When it was over, we were kind of like, 'now what?' The moment was gone," he said. He remembered thinking: "How could I do this better?" That, he said, was the beginning of building Space Beyond and its "Ashes to Space" program, which will use a CubeSat, a class of miniature cube-shaped satellites, to send as many as 1,000 people's ashes to space in one go."
Ryan Mitchell, a manufacturing engineer with experience on the NASA space shuttle program and at Blue Origin, founded Space Beyond to create an affordable space memorial service. Space Beyond's "Ashes to Space" program plans to carry up to 1,000 people's ashes in a single CubeSat. The company signed a launch services agreement with Arrow Science & Technology to integrate the CubeSat on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission scheduled for October 2027. The service leverages rideshare economics to reduce per-customer costs, offers a baseline price of $249, and requires customers to obtain cremation separately.
Read at TechCrunch
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