The ashes of the original James Duhan, who played the engineer Montgomery Scott on the original Star Trek The television series has been on the International Space Station for 12 years: and Sunday Times There is an interesting backstory of how London happened. Dohan died in 2005 at the age of 85, and his family wanted him to join the ISS.
Official requests to bring Duhan’s ashes to the ISS were denied, but Richard Garriot, one of the first private citizens to travel to the space station, managed to smuggle some of Duhan’s ashes into the space station’s Columbus module. Garriott says he took a laminated photo of Dohan and some of his ashes and placed them under the floor of Columbus. He didn’t tell anyone about the plan – only Dohan’s family knew.
“She was completely hidden,” Garriott told the Times. “His family was very happy that the ashes were made there but we were all disappointed. We didn’t like talking about it in public for so long. Now enough time has passed that we can do it.”
This is not the first time that the ashes of Duhan have come to heaven. Part of their ashes were aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket in 2008, but it failed a few minutes after the rocket was launched. And in 2012, a hole with some ash from Duhan went into space above the SpaceX Falcon 9.. Times, The Rise of Milking has traveled about 1.7 billion miles in space, and has orbited the Earth more than 70,000 times.
Duhan’s son Chris thanked Garriott for smuggling the ashes of his late father aboard the ISS. “What he did was touching – it meant a lot to me, to my family and it would mean a lot to my dad.”
Years after his death, Scotti still walks boldly … well, the rest you know.
