Send Your Pets’ Remains To Space

A new service offers to launch your pet’s ashes into space

pet cemetary
Richard Levine/Demotix/Corbis

Celestis Pets has delivered a new option for pet burial—sending pets' remains into space.

Sure, burying Fido in the backyard might provide you with a lasting memorial to a beloved companion, but what happens when you move? You could go to a pet cemetery or scatter their ashes. But space burial is, increasingly, an option for humans—Celestis Pets is an offshoot of Celestis, a company that sends human remains into space—so why not for pets, too? 

“Our pet service flights are an idea that’s been a long time coming,” Celestis CEO Charles Chafer said in a press release. “Over the years we’ve received so many requests to include pets in our memorial spaceflights and we’re very excited to extend this tribute to our animal companions.”

According to Celestis' websites, for both humans and pets, a small part of cremated remains are placed in a container and launched into space, along with other commercial spaceflight ventures, including commercial or research satellites. The service isn’t cheap, though the same prices for pets also apply to human remains.

Trips to the moon or deep space start at $12,500. Other options cost less. If you want your pet’s remains to orbit the earth, that will cost $4,995. If you want to send them just to the edge of space and then bring them back, that’s $995, and you get the capsule with your pet’s remains returned to you. 

It might seem like a lot, but in the world of pet funerals, this new option fits right in, alongside $1,000 and up headstones and urns. If you treat your pets well in life—with services from psychological consultation to luxury hotel vacations now available—you can treat them well in the afterlife, too.

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