Ash-bearing rocket beams up ‘Scotty’

Cremated remains of actor James Doohan, who portrayed engineer Scotty on “Star Trek,” and of Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper soared into suborbital space Saturday aboard a rocket.

It was the first successful launch from Spaceport America, a commercial spaceport being developed in the southern New Mexico desert.

Suzan Cooper and Wende Doohan fired the rocket carrying small amounts of their husbands’ ashes, and those of about 200 other people.

“Go baby, go baby,” said Eric Knight of the commercial launch company, UP Aerospace Inc. of Farmington, Conn.

Since it was a suborbital flight, the rocket soon parachuted back to Earth, coming down at the White Sands Missile Range.

An earlier launch attempt by UP Aerospace in September ended when the rocket spiraled out of control and crashed.

For Saturday’s launch, family members paid $495 to place a few grams of their relatives’ ashes on the rocket. Celestis, a Houston company, contracted with UP to send the remains into space.

Family and friends who watched the 20-foot rocket take off from about four miles away cheered and cried, and the mission control center announced the launch a success.

The launch from the fledgling spaceport -- currently a 100-foot-by-25-foot concrete slab in a patch of desert more than 50 miles north of Las Cruces -- keeps the New Mexico project ahead of its nearest competitor, in West Texas.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com’s founder, is said to be developing the Texas spaceport. Bezos’ Blue Origin is working to develop tourist space flights.