i thought you didn't believe in God, Charles?

How cynical am I to assume there are few, if any, of the contracted remains actually on that rocket?

Come now, this isn't just for the super-rich.

Surely there must be dozens of affordable ways for the masses to turn themselves into air pollution?

Let's hurtle ALL RepubliKKKans into outer space---but one way only. I'm all for it as long as they never come back.

If someone was offering fossilzation, I'd be first in line.

Hunter S Thompson was the first.

@6:

Incorrect. The first citation for human remains going into space occurred when a portion of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry's ashes were taken onto orbit in 1992 by Columbia on STS-52, although they were returned to earth at the completion of that same mission. The first "burial in space" occurred in 1997 when a Pegasus air-launch rocket was sent onto orbit with the cremated remains of a number of individuals, including Roddenberry and Timothy Leary, but again it de-orbited in 2002. After Thompson died in 2005 his ashes were fired out of a cannon as the finale of his funeral service held on his ranch in Colorado.

@3 - You can contribute to my "Send Treacle's Remains to Space in a Low Earth Orbit Coffin-Sat" GoFundMe.com page, and we can crowd-source it! I'll be building the Coffin-Sat myself in my clean-room garage-workshop (I'm thinking 2nd-gen Oak, or maybe Ironwood).

@7 - The first living being in orbit, and the subsequent first death & orbiting remains, was Laika in 1957, when the Russians forced it into Sputnik 2 prior to launch:

"Laika, a stray dog from the streets of Moscow, was selected to be the occupant of the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 that was launched into outer space on 3 November 1957."
"Sputnik 2 was a suicide mission for the poor dog; the satellite was not designed to come safely back to Earth."
(SIDE NOTE: It was not a 'suicide' mission, the dog did not agree to die in space. Humans chose to "sacrifice" the dog (aka murder it) in an unplanned way for spaceflight science reasons.)
Allegedly, "Laika survived in orbit for four days and then died when the cabin overheated."
However, "According to other sources, severe overheating and the death of the dog occurred only five or six hours into the mission."
(Horrible way to die, imho.)
"The spacecraft continued circling the Earth until April 14, 1958, when it re-entered the atmosphere after 162 days in space," burning up in the atmosphere southbound over the Western Hemisphere.

So even Laika's remains de-orbited, vaporized, and are now scattered throughout the Earth's atmosphere.

We really can't do this right, can we?

@9: Progress! Science! We’ll get there, even if we can’t really define what where is, or why...

Since — improbably for this crowd — nobody has said it yet, I’ll take the gimme: who here would pay good money to send a very-much-alive, day-drinking hipster Marxist lifestyle columnist into space?

@9:

Yes, I'm aware of Laika's fate, and yes it was deliberate and ended up being far more horrific than even Korolev and his team intended.

As for "not getting it right", well, it's an inherently high-risk endeavor involving some of the most technologically complicated machinery ever invented. Frankly, it's pretty impressive that, considering all the literally millions of ways a space flight can go wrong, we get it right on a fairly regular basis these days.

@10:

If I'm going to pay for anyone to go up, I'd put myself in line ahead of Charles.