The rocket carrying the cremated remains of James Doohan has come back to earth - but nobody knows exactly where
Posted on 05/11/2007 6:27:13 AM PDT by bedolido
Beaming him up was the easy part - the problem was transporting him back to Earth.
A search team continues to look for a rocket carrying ashes of the actor James Doohan, who played Scotty on Star Trek, almost two weeks after it hurtled to the edge of space from New Mexico.
Remains of the Canadian-born actor, who died two years ago at the age of 85, blasted off from a remote launch site on April 29 carrying a payload that included the ashes of astronaut Gordon Cooper and several experiments.
A spokeswoman for Houston-based Space Services Inc, which organised the "memorial spaceflight," says the telephone-pole sized rocket descended by parachute into a rugged area that a search team has repeatedly failed to reach.
"The terrain is very mountainous; it's not somewhere that you can walk or drive to. My understanding is that it will take some time to get up into there," Susan Schonfeld said.
"They know the general location, and we have the utmost confidence that they will recover it."
Schonfeld says the search had been hampered by "horrendous" weather in the desert state, but expected the Up Aerospace Spaceloft XL craft to be recovered in coming days.
Doohan played the starship Enterprise's chief engineer Montgomery Scott in the original 1966-1969 Star Trek television series.
He inspired the legendary catch phrase "Beam me up, Scotty" - even though it was never actually uttered on the show.
Hundreds of spectators clapped and cheered as his ashes roared aloft along with those of some 200 other people, including astronaut Gordon Cooper, who first went into space in 1963 and died in 2004 at age 77.
The rocket carrying the cremated remains of James Doohan has come back to earth - but nobody knows exactly where
Guess I wasn’t paying attention. I presumed Scotty’s ashes were being sent out to space to stay there.
Me too. If his ashes aren’t being scattered into space, then I fail to see the point of the exercise.
James Doohan died at the age of 85, not 77.
Correct. That’s what the article said. It was Gordon Cooper who died at 77.
It probably has more to do with tracking the spacecraft they are on. We have to track all near-earth objects so we can make sure it doesn't collide w/ satellites or other spacecraft.
He’s trapped in a transporter so he can reappear on a future version of Star Trek!
I agree — a proper send-off would have been to cast his remains adrift into space from the ISS (complete with bagpipe farewell)...
Scotty’s ashes are...
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WAIT FOR IT...
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ALMOST THERE...
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...where no man has ever gone before...
LOL... thanks for the Friday morning laugh
Oh yeah, I misread the article my bad.
question... is anyone as concerned about the saying “My Bad” as they are “I’d Hit it”?
Who doesn’t make those mistakes when converting between star dates and the Gregorian Calendar? It’s so hard to properly account for the effects of warp speed on relativistic time.
As long as one pronounces "Uranus" properly (And not Ur-in-is) I'm okay with it.
Although “What say you” is really starting to grate on me.
Precisely why I flunked out at Star Fleet Academy.
Has nobody checked the warp drive? What about the transporter room.
Dang, I knew this would be a problem....I wondered if his request would be denied and it should have been. Yeah, it’s a good sentiment, all right, having your ashes orbit the earth and all — but yes potentially dangerous for astronauts....
Well, the next time someone wants his ashes orbiting in space, I hope the request is turned down.
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