Our space fact for the week is that late James Doohan, who played Scotty on the original Star Trek, has, in fact, gone to space more than once. Well, his remains have.

As reported by The Verge, his first trip on a rocket was aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 1 Flight 3 back in 2008. Sadly, that rocket failed a few minutes after launch.

Despite official requests to bring Doohan’s ashes on the ISS having been denied, in 2008, Richard Garriott, one of the first space tourists, smuggled some of his ashes along with a laminated picture of Doohan up to the International Space Station. Without the knowledge of anyone else, except for Doohan’s family, he hid the picture and ashes under the floor of the Columbus module.

“It was completely clandestine,” Garriott told the Times of London. “His family were very pleased that the ashes made it up there but we were all disappointed we didn’t get to talk about it publicly for so long. Now enough time has passed that we can.”

And in 2012, an urn with some of his ashes flew on a SpaceX Falcon 9.

According to the Times, Doohan’s ashes have traveled some 1.7 billion miles across space, and have orbited the Earth more than 70,000 times.

James Doohan isn’t the only person whose ashes have gone to space. In 2006, the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, were placed in an aluminum capsule on the New Horizons spacecraft, which visited Pluto in 2015.

Ad Astra James Doohan and Clyde Tombaugh.

More Information

The ashes of James Doohan — Scotty from Star Trek — are aboard the International Space Station (The Verge)

A man’s cremated ashes are heading to Pluto on a space probe, and it’s the longest known post-mortem flight (Business Insider)