Geek Habitat

Beam up to space delayed for Star Trek’s Scotty (actor James Doohan) while company Space Enterprises runs additional tests on its rockets’ engines.

If Scotty were assigned to the task, the rocket would launch on schedule and without incident, dammit!

I don’t know… the whole space burial thing seems sort of wasteful and pointless. It’s not like your ashes are going to drift peacefully and intermingle with the “stuff of life” that is the cosmos. Instead, a minimal amount of your ashes are going to be collected and crammed into a tiny container, and that tiny container will be crammed into successively larger metal containers — the largest being, of course, the rocket that launches you and however many strangers have also decided to be buried up there. There, you and your unknown neighbors will float for years or centuries, cluttering up the very same cosmos like so many discarded soup cans until everything burns up on re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere or some other celestial body. If your ashes collide with the International Space Station, a spacecraft or a satellite, can your kin be held liable for damages?

Now, if you could have your ashes mixed with solid rocket fuel propellant and literally go up in a blaze of glory, that would be something… and more environmentally “friendly”, to boot. Well, as environmentally friendly as launching huge combustible propellants into our Earth’s upper atmosphere ever is, anyway.

---

Unrelated… WHY do people pay more than retail for new items on eBay?! 4GB iPod Nano’s going for over $249 plus shipping (Amazon.com’s price)… one for almost $300! Insanity. And if it’s because they can’t wait 24 hours or a couple days for Amazon or their local Apple store to get more in stock, they need to up their meds!