The ashes of the late James Doohan, who played chief engineer Montgomery Scott on the original Star Trek television series, have been aboard the International Space Station for 12 years – and the Sunday Times of London has the fascinating backstory of how it happened. Doohan died in 2005 at the age of 85, and his family wanted to fulfill his wish to get on the ISS.
Official requests to bring Doohan’s ashes to the ISS were denied, but Richard Garriott – one of the first private citizens to travel on the space station – managed to smuggle some of Doohan’s ashes into the space station’s Columbus module . Garriott says he took a laminated photo of Doohan and some of his ashes and put it under the Columbus floor. He didn’t tell anyone about the plan – only he and Doohan’s family knew until now.
“It was completely clandestinely,” Garriott told the Times. His family was very happy that the ashes got there, but we were all disappointed that we couldn’t talk about it in public for so long. Now enough time has passed that we can, “
It is not the first time that Doohan’s ashes have landed in heaven. Some of its ashes were aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket in 2008, but that rocket failed minutes after launch. And in 2012, an urn with some ashes from Doohan flew into space aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9. TimesDoohan’s axis has traveled some 1.7 billion miles through space and orbited the Earth more than 70,000 times.
Doohan’s son Chris thanked Garriott for smuggling his dead father’s ashes aboard the ISS. “What he did was touch – it meant so much to me, so much to my family and it would have meant so much to my dad,” he said.
Years after his death, Scotty is still going bold … well, you know the rest.