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WASHINGTON, Dec 25 (AFP): Offer a personalised star for Christmas, or buy your late loved one a celestial sepulchre, a Texas company specialising in extra-terrestrial services for space lovers has a gift line that few others can match.
Houston-based Space Services Inc. certainly markets its gifts out of this world. Since 1997 the company has offered the opportunity to have one's ashes, post-cremation, delivered up into orbit for posterity.
More recently, the company has offered the chance for people to single out a star have it named for whoever they like.
"We are attempting to give the public around the world the opportunity to be involved in very real space missions," said Space Services chief executive Charles Chafer.
The challenge of arranging space flights for its special payload notwithstanding, the company's space burials have taken off. It is preparing for its sixth launch in March 2006.
The first launch in 1997 carried the remains of 24 men, including Gene Roddenberry the creator of the legendary television series Star Trek; 1960s counterculture icon Timothy Leary, and Princeton University physicist Gerard ONeill.
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