A rocket designed by the corporation owned by batty billionaire Elon Musk, and operated by Spaceflight Industries—a Seattle-based company that manages "rideshare launches"—will send the dust of a 100 or so dead humans into space. The service is provided by a San Francisco-based corporation, Elysium Space, that plans to make some kind of money from "memorial satellites." Families on the ground can track these dead stars in real time with an app. After four years, however, the memorial (a 4-inch square Elysium Star 2 cubesat, as it is called) becomes a falling star that's disintegrated by our thick atmosphere. It only costs $2,500 for a sample of a loved one to "soar thru the Heavens."

CNN reports that this is not the "first time someone's earthly remains were sent to be among the stars." For one, a vial containing the dust of an astronomer killed in a car crash that almost killed his wife was sent all the way to the moon on a NASA mission that looked more like Earth attacking the Moon.

During this mission, scientists deliberately slammed a low-orbit satellite, the Lunar Prospector, into the moon with the hope of spotting, in the detonation, signs of water vapor in the lunar sky. But the moon then, as now, refused to be anything more than dust and more dust. “The major issue [all] Apollo astronauts pointed out [about the moon] was dust, dust, dust,” said Lawrence “Larry” Taylor, a geophysicist who once directed the Planetary Geosciences Institute at the University of Tennessee and died last year, four days after his 79th birthday. The moon's dust is not the nice dust of human remains, but the evil dust that looks like fine fragments of glass. Dust without life is just wicked.

There was also another space burial in 2012 that included the ashes of actor James Doohan, who played Scotty on the original Star Trek. (Doohan died in Redmond.)

But why should the dead have all of the fun? Why should you wait for your death to go to space when you can send your dust to space while you're alive and kicking? You shed about 8 or so pounds of dead skin a year. You only need a teaspoon of that and a couple of thousand dollars, and there you go. Your daily death can be placed on a memorial satellite, and launched to space from Cape Canaveral, which was once called Cape Kennedy, and is the setting for J.G. Ballard's brilliant short story, "The Dead Astronaut" ("With a low metallic sigh, the burning capsule of the dead astronaut soared over our heads, the vaporizing metal pouring from its hull"). Don't wait to die. Do it now. And for a good four years, you can watch your own death circle the world with your loved ones still around.