The View Is to Die For

Because things are getting kind of cluttered down here, a company in Texas (of course) is developing the business of burying people in the void of space. It’s certainly roomier up there, even for Texans. It’s chilly too, but no maintenance fees. Space is also at least theoretically closer to the place good people go for eternity, according to some. And it offers a front-row seat to all the Mars landings.

For well-to-do cadavers, those special dead someones who have everything but can’t take it with them, it’s an opportunity to leave but stay special in absentia. A kind of once-in-a-deathtime experience. Also, there’s status. Buried has always meant being placed down low; look where this editorial is. But if you’re buried in space, people look up to you.

Space burials are not for everyone, of course; you can’t be alive, for example, or allergic to cosmic radiation. It’s more difficult for family to visit space graves, let alone deliver flowers, because the final resting place is neither final nor resting. And there is a catch: Not all of you can go. Only a few grams of anyone, in ash form, will be rocketed into frigid orbit alongside tons of data transmission gear for a modest eternity of weightlessness on a Russian satellite, which, like Southwest Airlines, serves no in-flight meals. Perhaps weightlessness appeals to plus-size people?

In 1997, the Houston company Celestis sent some of the 1960s pop icon Timothy Leary up high again. Now it has reserved space on, among other craft, Russia’s Kosmos I satellite and rocket scheduled to depart in April on a one-way trip from Russia’s Baikonur Cosmodrome, from which Yuri Gagarian left to become the first man in and out of space.

Along with complex communications circuits, the Dnepr rocket’s cargo compartment will carry up to 150 vials of 1 to 7 grams of cremated human remains to zip around the Earth for a century or so. Oh, the places they will go! And the prices they will pay -- $995 to $5,300, depending on how much of the person makes the manifest. For $12,500, the company will take part of you along to crash into the moon. No air bags required. But no pets either. You know how they mess up anywhere.

Burying on high does raise the possibility of storing other used things up there. Part of Ted Williams? Movies like “Gigli” that die on Earth? Spam? Chris Matthews and Al Sharpton? And why not sell rocket rides to the sun? Talk about cremation.

Even if you can’t make the April launch because you’re still alive, you can reserve a tube on a later trip. And the celestial burial has an added bonus. In about 156 years your orbiting capsule will drift down into the gravitational grasp of Earth again. Then, for a brief, shining moment you’ll be an integral part of a shooting star. What a way to go, again!

Beats being dug up for a freeway.