This startup will send the ashes of 1,000 people into space – affordably – in 2027

Ryan Mitchell, founder of a startup called space beyondhe remembers looking up at the night sky while camping in 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’s seen the cost of access to space drop dramatically, thanks in large part to Blue Origin’s competitor SpaceX. He thought that those stars in the sky seemed closer than ever before.

Mitchell told TechCrunch that the idea finally came to him when he was attending a family member’s ashes-spreading ceremony.

“And when it was over, we were kind of like, ‘What now?’ And he said, ‘The moment has passed.’ He remembers thinking, ‘How can I do this better?’”

He said that was the beginning of the construction of Space Beyond and its “Ashes to Space” program, which will be used Cubesata class of miniature, cube-shaped satellites, is designed to send up to 1,000 people’s ashes into space at once. On Thursday, Space Beyond Announce It signed a launch services agreement with Arrow Science and Technology, which will integrate the CubeSat into the SpaceX Falcon 9 ridesharing mission scheduled for October 2027.

Sending people’s ashes into space is not a new idea. Companies like Celestis have been doing this since the 1990s. What Mitchell said is different about Space Beyond is that it does it affordably — its cheapest offering comes in at just $249. Other options usually cost thousands of dollars. (However, clients will need to conduct the cremation elsewhere.)

Space Beyond achieves this in several ways, Mitchell said. Foremost is the ride-sharing model, which has greatly democratized access to space in general. Companies can now develop small CubeSats that are integrated into larger spacecraft for a fraction of the total price of riding aboard a Falcon 9, allowing for all kinds of new science missions and small-scale commercial missions.

But Space Beyond is also flat and doesn’t try to generate big returns for investors.

“I’ve been told I don’t charge enough for this service,” he said, especially when considering how the funeral industry is built around overcharging people at one of their most vulnerable moments. “But I’m not looking to take over the world, and I’m not looking to make a billion dollars doing it.”

There are limits to what Space Beyond can offer, given the CubeSat format. First, customers will only be able to send one gram of ash into space. This allows the startup to install enough customer ashes on board to make the idea financially viable. But it’s also a result of the fact that despite the ease of access to space, weight is still a big consideration for launch providers like SpaceX.

Space Beyond’s CubeSat will also only be in orbit for five years, so this isn’t a memorial that will last forever.

But Mitchell said there are benefits to this approach. The company’s CubeSat will be in what’s known as a “sun-synchronous orbit,” which is located at a very high altitude of about 550 kilometers (or about 341 miles). This allows the satellite to fly over the entire globe. With many modern spacecraft tracking services available, customers should be able to locate a CubeSat and know when it is in the night sky above their homes.

The five-year maximum also means that the aluminum CubeSat and the ash on board will eventually meet a fiery end as it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere upon its return — a nice symbolic end, Mitchell said, even if there’s no guarantee that customers will be able to see the resulting fireball.

Space Beyond will also not physically spread the agent’s ashes into space. That would be “almost a nightmare scenario,” Mitchell said, because the particles could create a cloud of debris that could wipe out other spacecraft. But since customers can only send about one gram per space, they will be able to do whatever they want with the rest of their loved one’s ashes.

When Mitchell left Blue Origin last year, he said he filled “several pages” of his notebook with ideas about what to do next. The range was wide, including options like trying to become a launch director at another space company, or becoming a bartender at Kava. Despite this, something kept pulling him back into this.

“I tried to talk myself out of (this idea) for a long time. I thought it would be too expensive or too difficult,” he explained. But he said it made sense to him that “every time I put in an actual engineering rig, I figure out what the requirements are and what the business case is.”

It was also an idea that he was clearly obsessed with. “My wife said, ‘I could have told you weeks ago. You can’t stop talking about this,'” he said.