The ashes of Scotty from Star Trek are aboard the International Space Station

The ashes of the late James Doohan, who played chief engineer Montgomery Scott on the original Star Trek television series, have been aboard the International Space Station for 12 years— and the Sunday Times of London has the fascinating backstory of how it happened. Doohan died in 2005 at the age of 85, and his family wanted to fulfill his wish of getting on the ISS.

Official requests to bring Doohan’s ashes on the ISS were denied, but Richard Garriott— one of the first private citizens to travel on the space station— managed to smuggle some of Doohan’s ashes into the space station’s Columbus module. Garriott says he took a laminated a picture of Doohan and some of his ashes and put it in under the floor of the Columbus. He didn’t...

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