The initiative will send the ashes of 1,000 people into space — cheaply — by 2027

Ryan Mitchell, the founder of the so-called Space Beyondhe remembers looking at the sky at night while camping at a government security post and thinking about what to do next.

A product engineer who worked as a NASA astronaut before spending nearly a decade at Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, Mitchell was considering his options. In the process, they’ve seen the cost of getting into space drop dramatically, thanks in large part to SpaceX’s Blue Origin. He thought that the stars in the sky seemed closer than ever.

Mitchell told TechCrunch that the idea came to him while attending a family member’s cremation ceremony.

“After that, we were like, ‘now what?’ Time passed,” he said. He remembered thinking: “How can I do this better?”

This, he said, was the beginning of building Space Beyond and its “Ashes to Space” program, which it will use CubeSatan array of small cube-shaped satellites, to send the ashes of up to 1,000 people into space at once. Thursday, Space Beyond he announced signed a launch services agreement with Arrow Science and Technology, which will include a CubeSat on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission scheduled for October 2027.

Sending human 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’s doing it cheaply — with its cheapest offering coming in at just $249. Other options often cost thousands of dollars. (That said, customers will need to cremate the body elsewhere.)

Mitchell said Space Beyond has accomplished this in several ways. The biggest is the rideshare model, which has democratized it in many places. Companies can now build small CubeSats that are integrated into larger spaceships at a reasonable cost to be mounted on the Falcon 9, allowing for all kinds of new science and small commercial missions.

But Space Beyond is also bootstrapped and not trying to bring huge returns to investors.

“I’ve been told that I’m not charging enough for this service,” he said, especially considering how funeral services are designed for high-income people at a time of crisis. “But I don’t want to take over the world, and I don’t want to make a billion dollars doing it.”

There are limits to what Space Beyond can provide, given the CubeSat’s capabilities. For one, customers will be able to send one gram worth of ash into space. This allows startups to connect with enough customers to make the idea financially viable. But it’s also because – despite the opportunity to get into space – weight is still a big consideration for startups like SpaceX.

Space Beyond’s CubeSat will also only be in orbit for five years, so this is not a memory that will last forever.

But Mitchell said there are benefits to this approach. The company’s CubeSat will be in what is known as the “solar orbit,” which is at an altitude of about 550 kilometers (or about 341 miles). This allows the satellite to fly around the world. With many modern flight tracking services available, customers will 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 aluminum CubeSat and the ash on board will burn up as it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere on re-entry — a nice symbolic ending, Mitchell said, although there’s no guarantee that customers will be able to see the incoming fireball.

Space Beyond will no longer scatter customer ashes into space. This could be “dangerous,” Mitchell said, as the particles could create a debris cloud that could damage other aircraft. But considering that customers can send about one gram per site, they will be able to do what they want with their loved one’s ashes.

When Mitchell left Blue Origin last year, he said he filled “several pages” of notebooks with ideas for what he could do. The range was huge, including options such as trying to become a director of an airline company, or becoming a Kava bartender. Something kept drawing him to this one, though.

“I tried to talk to myself (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 “every time I put in a standard engineering, I know the requirements, and the business.”

It was also an idea he was obviously very passionate about. He said: “My wife said: ‘If I had told you weeks ago, you wouldn’t stop talking about this issue.’