Ryan Mitchell, the founder of a startup called Space Beyond, remembers looking at the night sky while camping at 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 had seen the cost to access space come down dramatically, thanks in large part to Blue Origin’s rival SpaceX. Those stars in the sky, he thought, seemed closer than ever.
Mitchell told TechCrunch that an idea finally clicked when he was attending a family member’s ash-spreading ceremony.
“When it was over, we were kind of like, ‘now what?’ The moment was gone,” he said. He remembered thinking: “How could I do this better?”
That, he said, was the beginning of building Space Beyond and its “Ashes to Space” program, which will use a CubeSat, a class of miniature cube-shaped satellites, to send as many as 1,000 people’s ashes to space in one go. On Thursday, Space Beyond announced it signed a launch services agreement with Arrow Science and Technology, which will integrate the CubeSat on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission scheduled for October 2027.
Sending people’s ashes to space is not a new idea. Companies like Celestis have been doing it since the 1990s. What Mitchell said is different about Space Beyond is that it’s doing it affordably — with its cheapest offering coming in at just $249. Other options typically cost in the thousands of dollars. (That said, customers will need to have the cremation performed elsewhere.)
Mitchell said Space Beyond has achieved this a few ways. Foremost is the rideshare model, which has greatly democratized access to space in general. Companies can now develop small CubeSats that get integrated into larger spacecraft for a fraction of the total price to hitch a ride on a Falcon 9, allowing for all sorts of new science and small-scale commercial missions.
But Space Beyond is also bootstrapped and not trying to generate big returns for investors.
“I’ve been told I’m not charging enough for this service,” he said, especially when considering how the funeral industry is built around over-charging 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 this.”
There are limits to what Space Beyond can offer, given the CubeSat format. For one, customers will only be able to send about one gram’s worth of ashes to space. This allows for the startup to fit enough customers’ ashes on board to make the idea financially viable. But it’s also a result of the fact that — despite the easier access to space — weight is still a huge consideration for launch providers like SpaceX.
Space Beyond’s CubeSat will also only be in orbit for about five years, so this is not 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 at a very high altitude of around 550 kilometers (or around 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 the CubeSat and know when it is in the night sky above their home.
A five-year limit also means that the aluminum CubeSat and the ashes onboard will ultimately meet a fiery end as it burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere upon re-entry — a nice symbolic ending, Mitchell said, even if there’s no guarantee that customers will be able to see the resulting fireball.
Space Beyond will also never physically spread a customer’s ashes in space. That would be “almost a nightmare scenario,” Mitchell said, as the particles could create a debris cloud that could doom other spacecraft. But given that customers can only send around one gram per space, they’ll be able to do what they want with the rest of a loved one’s ashes.
When Mitchell left Blue Origin last year, he said he filled “several pages” of a notebook with ideas of what to do next. The range was wide, including options like trying to be a launch director at another space company, or becoming a Kava bartender. Something kept pulling him back to this one, though.
“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 just made sense to him “every time I put actual engineering rigor to it, figured out what the requirements are, and what the business case is.”
It was also the idea that he was clearly most obsessed with. “My wife said: ‘I could have told you that weeks ago. You can’t stop talking about this,’” he said.
