For hundreds of people, the final resting place is no longer six feet under but miles overhead. This episode traces space burials from a 1931 science fiction novella, The Jameson Satellite by Neil R. Jones, through the 1965 satire The Loved One and a 1977 Seattle Times pitch, to the 1992 Space Shuttle Columbia mission STS-52 that carried a sample of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's ashes, and the first private flight in April 1997 when Celestis dropped a Pegasus rocket from a plane over the Canary Islands.

The hosts explain why air-launching at 11 kilometers saves fuel, how the tyranny of the rocket equation limits payloads to a few grams, and how memorial capsules ride as secondary payloads across suborbital, orbital, and lunar or deep-space tiers offered by Celestis, Space NTK, Beyond Burials, and others. They address the space debris ...