Bad Astronomy

Remains to be seen

“The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.”

Remember I wrote a while back on how James Doohan (Star Trek’s Scotty) had some of his ashes launched on a suborbital rocket into space?

Well, it turns out that the payload is, um, missing. It fell in some difficult to reach terrain, evidently, and the rocket company, UP Aerospace, can’t find it. It’s in dense vegetation, and while they know where it is to within a few hundred meters, they’re having a hard time tracking it down (thought the article linked above implies there is a transmitter on the rocket payload which should make finding it a lot easier). They’ll try again next week, though it’s unclear why they’re waiting that long. The weather there looks pretty clear right now.

LiveScience.com has an earlier article about this, too. Not so incidentally, Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper’s remains were on the payload, too.