Death be not proud, though some would send thee into a 1,900-mile-high orbit

Those of us who were born too soon to have realistic hopes of getting in on space travel should be cheered by that story in the paper the other day about the plan to “bury” people in space.

Celestis, a group in Melbourne, Fla., has applied for and received federal permission to send the ashes of more than 10,000 persons into a 1,900-mile-high orbit.

The actual flight into space will be made by Space Services Inc., of Houston, which plans to use its own small Conestoga rocket.

So if we can’t get into orbit in life, we can make it in eternity.

The cost will be only $3,900, according to Celestis, which is no more than the cost today of a classy funeral, and not as much, if you’re going to go for a bronze casket, a live organist and a tenor, not to mention a name clergyman.

The send-off services ought to be exhilarating--much more fun than an ordinary funeral, which is all too often followed by that gloomy procession to the cemetery and the macabre burial ritual itself.

It seems to me that clergymen would love the change of scene from church to launching pad, and a chance to work up whole new eulogies, full of references to God’s heaven, and eternal space, and time incalculable, where there is no death.

The funeral service could be combined with the wake, which would follow the launching immediately. With the loved one safely in orbit, we could break out the booze and the hors d’oeuvres and get on with the celebration, secretly happy that our feet are still planted firmly on the Earth.

This scheme has been approved by the Transportation Department, which oversees commercial space activities, after consultation with the State Department, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of Defense.

“In their reviews,” the story said, “the agencies found that the proposed launch will not affect any U.S. civil or military space projects, nor will it interfere with other nations’ spacecraft.”

I wonder what this new practice will do to the Neptune Society, which buries people’s ashes at sea, and to places like Forest Lawn, which are in the business of selling plots of ground or tombs for people’s remains to be kept in for “perpetual care.”

Obviously the perpetual care of a graveyard, especially one inside a metropolis, is not easy to guarantee. We have already seen them unceremoniously bulldozing up Indian graves to erect a new downtown; those Indians were accorded Christian burials, too, I suspect, from the nearby Plaza Church, which just goes to show you the power of promises when they conflict with economic growth.

Sooner or later our inner-city cemeteries will be full, no matter how ingeniously they stack the bodies, and in a few generations no one living is going to be interested in paying for the perpetual care of remote ancestors, and our cemeteries will become condominiums, complete with clubhouses, pools and spas. That is, if we survive the Star Wars age at all.

There is still much to be said for burial at sea. Despite our waste disposal problem, the ocean still seems endless to us, large enough to swallow all our sins; and it is pleasant to think of being washed back and forth eternally on its bosom, in fair weather and foul, on this shore and that, sunrise to sunset, a wanderer, free at last from the bonds of earth.

However, there are those who never feel comfortable in water; I suppose a fear of drowning can be carried to the grave, so to speak; there are those who prefer a tidy casket, sealed with lead and guaranteed not to leak.

But surely there must be free spirits to whom the idea of flying forever through space, round and round the globe, free of gravity, traveling at thousands of miles an hour, seen from below by their loved ones as a tiny star in the sky, must be appealing.

One of the most attractive sales points about the new proposal is that the containers would be coated with a highly reflective surface, making them easy to spot from the ground through small telescopes or binoculars. (It didn’t say how you could tell your own Aunt Myrtle’s container from someone else’s aunt’s container.)

There is also the problem, it seems to me, of eternal presence. If one’s ancestors are forever orbiting, always casting a sparkling eye down on Earth, always easy to spot in dark of night, how is one ever to feel quite free of them; quite free to live one’s own life?

There is at least a sense of permanence, of finality, in having some autocratic relative six feet under, rather than passing in plain view every 24 hours, like some patrol.

The story said former astronaut Donald K. (Deke) Slayton is head of Space Services, which is going to deliver the ashes into space. Alas, yet another of our astronauts has disappointed us.

They were to be the heroes of the new age; our best and brightest; our living supermen; our young Lindberghs, claiming space in the name of the human heart.

Strangely, they have vanished into nondescript careers; failed somehow to capture the public’s devotion; and here is another of them--turning up as a funeral director.

So that is what has happened so far to our great hopes for space; that is what has come of all our imaginings of man’s flowering in the cosmos.

A new place to wage war and a new place to bury our dead.