The ashes of the actor behind Star Trek‘s character were hidden on the International Space Station (shorted to ISS onwards) by Richard Garriott, also known as Lord British and General British.

At the beginning of most Star Trek films and series, we often hear a certain sentence: Space – the final frontier. James Doohan has reached it. He was previously the actor of „Scotty” (Montgomery Scott) in the original series, as one of the key crew members of the Enterprise. Fifteen years after his death, we learned that his ashes (or parts of it, to be exact) have been hidden. (Fortunately, he lived a lengthy life, as he passed away at the age of 85.)

This is where we need to Richard Garriott, who was an important person in the gaming industry in the eighties (he was responsible for creating the Ultima franchise, then he made the two LineAge games, followed by Tabula Rasa in 2007). In 2008, he flew up to the ISS (which cost him about thirty million dollars…), where he secretly hid Doohan’s laminated picture, as well as his ashes, under the floor of Columbus. This was kept in silence until 2020’s Christmas Day, when Doohan’s son, Chris, published the details on Twitter.

„It was completely clandestine. 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,” Garriott said in an interview with The Times. In 2008, a portion of Doohan’s ashes were aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 1, followed by 2012’s SpaceX launch of Falcon 9. The Times claims that the ashes have now orbited Earth over seventy thousand times, collectively travelling about 1.7 billion miles in space. „What he did was touching—it meant so much to me, so much to my family and it would have meant so much to my dad,” Chris said.

So for Scotty, space has indeed become the final frontier. He could beam us up now.

Source: ReviewGeek