Star Trek actor’s ashes smuggled onto the International Space Station

Unbeknownst to people to on the International Space Station, the ashes of Star Trek icon James Doohan (Scotty) have been hidden there for over a decade.

Is this next story touching or weird? You decide.

In 2008, entrepreneur and video game developer Richard Garriott became one of the first private citizens to travel to outer space. He boarded the International Space Station, but smuggled in something he’s only now coming clean about: the ashes of actor James Doohan, who played Starship Enterprise engineer Scotty on the original Star Trek series.

Doohan’s son Chris concocted the plan, as he now revealed to The Times. To get it done, the pair printed out three cards with Doohan’s photograph on them, each laminated with a sprinkling of Doohan’s ashes. Garriott hid them in his flight data file. “Everything that officially goes on board is logged, inspected and bagged,” Garriott said. “[T]here’s a process, but there was no time to put it through that process.”

One of those cards is on a wall in Chris Doohan’s home:

Another Garriott let float into outer space. The third he hid under the cladding on the floor of the space station’s Columbus module. “As far as I know, no one has ever seen it there and no one has moved it,” Garriott said. “James Doohan got his resting place among the stars.”

“My dad had three passions: space, science and trains. He always wanted to go into space,” Christ Doohan said. “What [Garriott] did was touching — it meant so much to me, so much to my family and it would have meant so much to my dad.”

James Doohan died in 2005 at the age of 85. This isn’t a bad way to spend eternity.

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h/t USA Today