Star Trek: The Original’s “Uhura” actress Nichelle Nichols died a month ago of natural causes at the age of 89.
In the latest, Celestis, a private space flight company working with NASA, announced that it will send some of Nichols’ ashes into space.
The flight is planned for later this year and will be carried by the United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan rocket, which will lift off from Cape Canaveral, fly past the Webb Space Telescope and enter the 150 million-300 million kilometers of planetary deep space.
Celestis said: “Vulcan will be one of the most distant and permanent human outposts, one of the pathfinders of human space exploration.
Celestis provides services to send humans into space and “space burials” of ashes, and one of Vulcan’s missions on this voyage will be to transport the ashes of 200 people, including Nichols and the ‘Star Trek’ cast and crew of Gene Roddenberry, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry and James Doohan, after some of Gene and Doohan’s ashes have already undergone space travel.
Nichols’ son Kyle Johnson provided Celestis with a sample of his mother’s ashes and his own DNA and said, “I’m sure she would have preferred to make the journey herself, but this is close enough.”
Related Post: American actress Nichelle Nichols dies at 89 of natural causes.
