In death, Berkeley space scientist and astronaut Michael Lampton is venturing where he could never go in life: into orbit.
In late December, small samples of the cremated remains of Lampton and 233 others, packed into a satellite’s cargo bay, will hitch a ride on a commercial rocket to make vast and eternal loops around the sun — more than 200 million miles from home.
“It’s important for him to be up there,” said Lampton’s daughter, Jennifer Lampton, an Oakland-based computer scientist, still grieving his death at age 82 last June. “He was fascinated by the boundaries of what we do, and don’t, know.”
Space burials are not a new concept. In addition to the Texas-based Celestis which is handling Lampton’s trip, a small handful of companies, including San Francisco’s Elysium Space Inc. and the U.K.-based balloon company Aura Flights, also send loved ones into space.
The launches are part of a growing trend away from traditional memorials, where the dead are buried in a formal cemetery or stored in an urn on the living room mantel.
They also represent a shift in how we think about, and use, the sky. The heavens are beginning to buzz with satellite activity, with the number of active orbiters predicted to increase 700% by the end of the decade.
Since 1997, Celestis has launched tiny ash-filled aluminum capsules of about 2,000 people. Each capsule is the size of a watch battery and holds one gram of the remains — the weight of a thumbtack. Ashes are not released but stay inside the capsule.
Some of the flights hold the remains of pets, including the service dog Indica-Noodle, the cat Pikachu, a yellow lab Quazar and a Shiba Inu named Laika, after the famed Russian canine astronaut.
“She was our supernova,” wrote Laika’s owner John Rothrock of Irvine.
Other passengers on Lampton’s flight include the remains of former NASA astronauts Philip Chapman and L. Gordon Cooper; Richard Braastad, whose interstellar “Cosmic Calls” radio messages sought conversations with aliens; and NASA’s first female astrogeologist Mareta West, who determined the crucial site for the first landing on the Moon.
Also aboard are several members of the “Star Trek” family — including creator Gene Roddenberry, his widow and actress Majel Barrett Roddenberry, “Uhura” actress Nichelle Nichols, “Scotty” actor James Doohan and visual effects artist Greg Jein — and VFX pioneer Douglas H. Trumbull, who produced the special effects for the science-fiction film “The Andromeda Strain.”
They will be joined by dozens of amateur space lovers, including a vendor machine manager, a Japanese professional baseball player, a carpet installer, a telecommunications engineer and a promising young physics student who died from injuries sustained in a car accident.
The cargo will also include what the company described as “authenticated DNA” from hair samples from former presidents Washington, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Reagan. But participants don’t have to be dead to “join” the ride: DNA scraped from the inside of the mouth can be processed, packaged in a titanium capsule and launched into space.
Celestis offers four space burial options ranging in cost from $3,000 to $13,000.
In one, the remains rocket straight up into the air for 68 miles and then descend, floating back to earth by parachute.
In another, the tiny containers can whiz around Earth, attached to a satellite traveling 17,000 mph about 500 miles overhead, circling their home planet every 90 minutes. To help families keep track of their travels, there’s an online map.
After three to 10 years, they make a fiery return to Earth. “The loved one becomes a ‘shooting star,’” said Celestis president Colby Youngblood.
A third trip, scheduled for next month, will send the remains of 64 people to the surface of the moon. The lunar lander will be their mausoleum.
The fourth adventure, enlisted by Lampton’s family, will rocket the satellite into orbit somewhere between Venus and Mars — where it will keep going until it reaches the so-called Lagrange Point, a location where the fierce gravitational forces of the sun and Earth create a point of perfect equilibrium for orbit.
There, they could circle forever. It’s the furthest that humans — dead or alive — have ever traveled.
It’s a fitting end for Lampton, a bubbly and brilliant scientist who worked at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Lab for 54 years.
As a young man, he studied physics at the California Institute of Technology, where he helped conduct one of the greatest pranks in college football history, an elaborate scheme known as the Great Rose Bowl Hoax of 1961. University of Washington fans were tricked into holding up placards that spelled out “CALTECH” instead of Huskies on live television.
Lampton went on to complete a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley under Kinsey Anderson, a pioneer in the field of space physics. For his thesis, he studied the behavior of electrons that contribute to the aurora borealis, or Northern Lights. He had numerous exciting encounters with rockets — and polar bears.
In the 1980s, he was honored to be named an active NASA Payload Specialist, trained to go into space and conduct scientific experiments for Space Shuttle mission STS-45. But then came a cancer diagnosis, denying him his dream. With his family, he traveled to Cape Canaveral to watch the launch of his space shuttle — from the ground.
“The only time I ever saw him sad,” said Jennifer Lampton, “was when he saw that launch go without him.”
Now, his ashes are ready to go. Shipped by his family to Houston, they were hand-carried to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where company Astrobotic integrated them into the spacecraft. Aerospace company United Launch Alliance will manage the rocket and the launch.
After a group dinner and a tour of the rocket, family members will watch the launch from a private viewing area.
First, it will orbit around the moon, dropping off a lander with lunar-bound “passengers,” another space burial option. Then it will fire its powerful rockets again, eventually entering a corridor around the sun.
“He will have the flight in death,” said Jennifer, “that he was never able to achieve in life.”