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

Ryan Mitchell, the founder of the startup called Space Beyondremember looking up at the night sky while camping in a state park and wondering what to 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 weighed his options. In that work, he has seen the cost of accessing space drop dramatically, as SpaceX’s Blue Origin rivals many. The stars in the sky, he thought, seemed closer than ever.

Mitchell told TechCrunch that the idea finally clicked when he attended a ceremony to scatter the ashes of a family member.

“When it was over, we were like, ‘now what?’ The moment is gone,” he said. He remembers thinking: “How can I do this better?”

This, he said, is the beginning of building Space Beyond and the “Ashes to Space” program, which will use it CubeSata class of miniature cube-shaped satellites, to send up to 1,000 people’s ashes into space at once. On Thursday, Space Beyond declare it signed a launch service agreement with Arrow Science & Technology, which will integrate the CubeSat in the SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission scheduled for October 2027.

Sending people’s ashes into space is not a new idea. Companies like Celestis have been doing it since the 1990s. What Mitchell says is different about Space Beyond is that it does so at a price – with the lowest offering just $249. Other options usually cost in the thousands of dollars. (That said, customers should be cremated elsewhere.)

Mitchell said that Space Beyond has achieved this in several ways. The main one is the ride-share model, which has democratized access to public spaces. Companies can now develop small CubeSats that can be integrated into larger spacecraft for a fraction of the total price of a Falcon 9 ride, enabling all kinds of new science and small-scale commercial missions.

But Space Beyond is also bootstrapped and does not try to generate large returns for investors.

“I’ve been told I don’t charge for this service,” he said, especially considering how the funeral industry is built around charging people at one of their most vulnerable times. “But I don’t want to rule the world, and I don’t want to make billions of dollars to do it.”

There are limits to what Space Beyond can offer in the CubeSat format. For one, customers can only send about one gram of ash to the venue. This allows the startup to have enough customers on board to make the idea financially viable. But it is also a result of the fact that – despite easier 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 about five years, so this isn’t a commemoration that will last forever.

But Mitchell says there are benefits to this approach. The company’s CubeSat will be in a “sun-synchronous orbit”, which is at an altitude of about 550 kilometers (or about 341 miles). This allows satellites to fly around the world. With so 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 home.

The five-year limit also means that the CubeSat’s aluminum and ash on board will eventually heat up as they burn up in Earth’s atmosphere on re-entry — a nice symbolic ending, Mitchell said, although there’s no guarantee that customers will see the resulting fireball.

Space Beyond will also not scatter customers’ ashes in space. That would be a “nightmare scenario,” Mitchell said, because the particles could create debris clouds that could damage other spacecraft. But if customers can only send about one gram per place, they will be able to do what they want with the ashes of their loved ones.

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

“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 says that “every time I apply a true engineering technique, I understand what the requirements are, and what the business case is.”

It was also the idea that he was clearly most passionate about. “My wife said: ‘I could have told you last week. You can’t stop talking about it,'” she said.