FRESNO, Calif. — Wendy Yang always admired her older sister, Sy Vang. She described Sy as adventurous, career-oriented, and a great mother.
“She was a person who really loved living, [and] the autonomy of life,” Wendy said.
They grew up in Visalia, in the San Joaquin Valley, and as adults, both moved north — Wendy to Sacramento and Sy to San Francisco. When Sy wasn’t working as a paralegal, Wendy said her sister was traveling to more than 40 countries — including Nepal, where she hiked to the base camp of Mount Everest.
“That was one of her most proudest moments,” Wendy said.
But in early 2020, Sy had just returned from a trip to Jordan and Turkey when she was diagnosed with stage 4 cervical cancer.
“We found out in May,” Wendy said. “[In] November, she passed.”
Sy left behind an adult son and five siblings. She was just 43 years old.
Before she died, Sy decided she wanted to be cremated, and she put Wendy in charge of dispersing her ashes. At first, Wendy considered releasing them out of a plane or scattering them at sea. But then she expanded her search – by a wide radius.
“I was like, well, what about space?” she asked.
And that's how Wendy came to be standing near a military base on California’s Central Coast earlier this summer, as a rocket carrying a portion of her sister's ashes blasted off into Earth’s orbit in what is called a memorial spaceflight.
Sy is among an estimated thousands of people whose final resting place is partly outside of the Earth.
As space becomes increasingly commercialized — and real estate on rockets can be rented out — demand for the services appears to be growing, with more companies and more flight options available than ever before.
A 300-mile send-off
After a quick online search, Wendy found the company that would eventually honor Sy’s thirst for discovery: Texas-based Celestis Memorial Spaceflights.
She mailed the company a portion of her sister’s cremated remains, then they packed a gram of them — less than a fifth of a teaspoon — into a tiny capsule the size of a watch battery.
Then that capsule, and 62 more containing other people’s remains, were tucked into a satellite that was placed inside a Falcon 9 rocket operated by tech giant SpaceX. That SpaceX launch was known as a “rideshare” mission, in which dozens of companies had rented space to send their devices, known as “payloads,” into orbit.
Finally, after more than a month of delays, that rocket took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base late in the morning on Aug. 16, as Wendy and family members of other “flight participants” watched from a park in nearby Lompoc.
“It was quiet, everyone was kind of awestruck,” she said. “And then when somebody had shouted out, ‘it's up in the air!’ That's when we snapped out of it and started cheering.”
But the moment that Wendy had been waiting for was around an hour into flight, when the satellite containing her sister’s remains was deployed out of the rocket and into orbit at a distance of about 300 miles. She found herself saying a final goodbye.
“The struggle is over…you can go,” she said. “You can go now.”
This satellite will orbit the Earth for three to five years, at which point it will fall and put on one more show as it re-enters the atmosphere.
“It burns up, so their loved one turns into a shooting star at the end of the life of the flight,” said Celestis President Colby Youngblood.
Can space travel be ‘accessible for everyone?’
The remains sent skyward are never intended to be dispersed directly into the vacuum of space. They stay contained within their capsules, which are closed inside spacecraft that are being used primarily for other purposes. Those spacecraft, too, are subject to various international treaties on peaceful use of space, and the Federal Aviation Administration has proposed rules to limit the lifespans of satellites in order to reduce overcrowding in orbit.
The one-way trip to orbit that launched last month is just one of the services offered by Celestis. Others include a short flight into lower orbit and back — after which the remains are returned to their family members — or a one-way mission to the surface of the moon, or even into deep space. Costs range from $3,500 to $12,000.
Even after factoring in around $2,700 to pay for cremation, Celestis’s most inexpensive service still comes out to less than the median cost of a traditional funeral and viewing: $8,300, according to a recent report provided by the National Funeral Directors Association.
Youngblood said the goal is “to make space accessible for everyone” — even if that’s after death.
Ironically, that’s how the original Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry visited space, years after his tv show coined and popularized the catchphrase “space: the final frontier.”
Roddenberry’s ashes were first smuggled into space on a NASA space shuttle mission in 1992, according to news reports at the time. His remains were then included on the first Celestis mission, an orbital launch in 1997, then again earlier this year for the company’s first mission into deep space.
Other celebrities who’ve used Celestis’s services include a handful of Star Trek actors and crew members, as well as famed sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke, who penned 2001: A Space Odyssey. According to Youngblood, missions have also included strands of hair from former presidents — including John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower and George Washington — thanks to a donation from a hair collector.
Celestis is not the only company to offer memorial spaceflights, but it was the first. Others that have boasted successful missions include Elysium Space, which launched its first memorial in 2015, and Beyond Burials, which claims to have launched successfully but does not make data on its flights available to the public.
Youngblood estimates that after 23 missions, his company has sent the remains of more than 2,000 people into space — which is far more than the number of live astronauts that have left the Earth’s surface, according to data reported by Astronomy magazine.
And based on the frequency of Celestis flights recently launched and scheduled in the near future, demand is increasing — “skyrocketing, literally,” Youngblood said.
Demand for cremation is on the rise, too
Part of the reason for rising demand for his company’s services, Youngblood says, is that more and more people are being cremated.
Indeed, according to data provided by the Cremation Association of North America, the proportion of the U.S. population being cremated has increased an order of magnitude from 5% in 1970 to 60% in 2023.
Executive Director Barbara Kemmis said that’s partly because Americans are becoming less tied to organized religions with long-held views of funeral rites. They’re also moving more, and not committing themselves to living (and dying) in the same place that their parents and grandparents did.
“And so having a cemetery with generations of family members may be less critical and cremation may be more appealing,” she said.
All that has also sparked creativity in how people honor the remains. Kemmis said encasing them in jewelry is popular.
“I know of an artist who incorporates the cremated remains into paint and can paint a portrait,” she said.
She’s also heard of ashes being packed into fireworks — and even shotgun casings.
“Often a way to memorialize somebody is to go out on that first day of hunting season, and include them in the hunt one last time,” she said. “You dream it, somebody will make it happen for you, right?”
‘The sky’s a little different’ now
When Lisa Cobb's husband Devon died last year, she never dreamed of sending him to space. Not, that is, until a funeral director near their home near Seattle mentioned it to her family in their long list of dispersal options following cremation.
“My daughter and I looked at each other and we said, ‘can you go back?’” she recalled.
A few years before his death of ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, Devon had taken up stargazing. Lisa said he’d spend hours each day behind a telescope he designed himself.
His remains went into orbit alongside Sy Vang’s. Lisa wishes they had had the chance to talk about it before he died.
“I think he would say thank you,” she said. “I think he would say, ‘you got me, this is the best journey that I could ever think of.’”
Wendy Yang’s dream was for her sister, Sy, to keep on traveling.
What Wendy didn’t realize was that Sy’s spaceflight would change her worldview, too.
“The sky's a little different knowing that my sister's up there,” she said. “It just kind of felt like there’s someone up there that loves me. You know?”
This story was produced with the support of the California Newsroom.
