Ryan Mitchell, the founder of a startup called Space Beyondhe remembers 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 was considering his options. In those jobs, he had seen the cost of accessing space drop dramatically, thanks in large part to Blue Origin’s SpaceX rival. Those stars in the sky, he thought, seemed closer than ever.
Mitchell told TechCrunch that an idea finally clicked when he attended a family member’s ashes.
“When it was over, we were like, ‘now what?’ The moment was gone,” he said. He recalled thinking, “How could I do it better?”
This, he said, was the beginning of building Space Beyond and the “Ashes to Space” program, which will use a CubeSata class of tiny cube-shaped satellites to send the ashes of up to 1,000 people into space in one go. On Thursday, Space Beyond was announced signed a launch services agreement with Arrow Science and Technology, which will integrate the CubeSat into a shared SpaceX Falcon 9 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 said is different about Space Beyond is that it’s doing it affordably — with its cheapest offering costing just $249. Other options typically cost thousands of dollars. (Because customers will have to do the burning elsewhere.)
Mitchell said Space Beyond has achieved this in a few ways. First is the rideshare model, which has greatly democratized access to space in general. Companies can now deploy small CubeSats that plug into larger spacecraft for a fraction of the total price to hitch a ride on a Falcon 9, enabling all kinds of new science and small-scale commercial missions.
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But Space Beyond is also closed and not trying to generate big returns for investors.
“I’ve been told I’m not charging enough for this service,” he said, especially when you consider how the funeral industry is built around overcharging people at one of their most vulnerable times. “But I’m not out to conquer the world and I don’t want to make a billion dollars doing it.”
There are limits to what Space Beyond can deliver, given the CubeSat format. For one, customers will only be able to send about one gram of ash into space. This allows the startup to fit enough customers to make the idea financially viable. But it’s also a result of the fact that – despite easier access to space – weight is still very important for launch providers like SpaceX.
Space Beyond’s CubeSat will also only be in orbit for about five years, so this isn’t a memorial that will last forever.
But Mitchell said there are benefits to this approach. The company’s CubeSat will be in what’s known as “modern sun orbit,” which is at a very high altitude of about 550 kilometers (or about 341 miles). This allows the satellite to fly around the globe. With many modern spacecraft tracking services available, customers should be able to locate the CubeSat and know when it is in the night sky above their home.
A five-year limit also means that the aluminum CubeSat and the ashes on board will eventually meet a fiery end as it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere on re-entry — a nice symbolic ending, Mitchell said, even if there’s no guarantee that customers will be able to see the resulting fireball.
Also, Space Beyond will never physically spread a customer’s ashes into space. That would be “almost a nightmare scenario,” Mitchell said, since the particles could create a debris cloud that could destroy other spacecraft. But since customers can only send one gram per site, they’ll be able to do whatever they want with a loved one’s remaining ashes.
When Mitchell left Blue Origin last year, he said he filled “several pages” of a notebook with ideas for what to do next. The range was wide, including options like trying to become a launch manager at another space company or becoming a Kava bartender. Something kept pulling him to it, though.
“I tried to escape 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 “whenever I put real engineering rigor to it, I understood what the requirements are and what the business case is.”
It was also the idea he was clearly most obsessed with. “My wife said, ‘I could have told you weeks ago. You can’t stop talking about it,” he said.
