Ryan Mitchell is the founder of a startup Space BeyondHe remembers looking up at the night sky while camping in a state park and wondering what he should do next.

A manufacturing engineer who worked on NASA’s space shuttle program before spending nearly a decade at Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin, Mitchell was considering his options. In those works, he saw the cost of accessing space drop dramatically, thanks in large part to Blue Origin’s rival, SpaceX. Those stars in the sky, he thought, seemed closer than ever.

Mitchell told TechCrunch that an idea finally clicked when he attended a family member’s cremation ceremony.

“When it was over, we were like, ‘Now what?’ The moment is gone,” he said. He remembered: “How can I make it better?”

This, he said, was the start of building Space Beyond and its “Ashes to Space” program, which would use a CubesatA class of miniature cube-shaped satellites, to send the ashes of 1,000 people into space at once. Thursday, Space Beyond announcement It has signed a launch services agreement with Arrow Science and Technology, which will integrate CubeSat into the SpaceX Falcon 9 rideshare mission scheduled for October 2027.

Sending human ashes into space is not a new idea. Companies like Celestis have been doing this since the 1990s. What Mitchell says about Space Beyond is that it’s doing it affordably — its cheapest offering comes in at just $249. Other options typically cost in the thousands of dollars. (That said, customers should be cremated elsewhere.)

Mitchell said Space Beyond achieved this in a few ways. The foremost is the rideshare model, which has greatly democratized access to space in general. Companies can now build small CubeSats that can be assembled into larger spacecraft for a fraction of the total cost and fly aboard the Falcon 9, allowing for all kinds of new science and small-scale commercial missions.

But Space Beyond is also bootstrapped and not trying to generate big returns for investors.

“I’ve been told I’m not charging enough for this service,” he said, especially when considering how the funeral industry is built around overcharging at their most vulnerable moments. “But I don’t want to take over the world, and I don’t want to make a billion dollars doing it.”

There are limitations to what Space Beyond can offer in the CubeSat format. For one, customers will only be able to send one gram worth of ash into space. This allows the startup to fit enough customers on board to make the concept financially viable. But it’s also a result of the fact that – despite easy access to space – weight is still a huge consideration for launch providers like SpaceX.

The Space Beyond CubeSat will also only be in orbit for about five years, so it’s not a monument that will last forever.

But Mitchell said there are advantages to this approach. The company’s CubeSat is in what is known as a “sun-synchronous orbit,” at a very high altitude of about 550 kilometers (or about 341 miles). This allows the satellite to fly over the entire Earth. With many modern spacecraft tracking services available, customers should be able to locate the CubeSat and know when it is in the night sky above their home.

A five-year limit means that the aluminum CubeSat and the ash on board will eventually meet a fiery end as it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere during re-entry — a nice symbolic ending, Mitchell says, even if there’s no guarantee that customers will be able to see the fireball.

Space Beyond will never physically scatter a customer’s ashes into space. That would be “almost a nightmare scenario,” Mitchell said, because the particles could create a debris cloud that could destroy other spacecraft. But given that customers can only send one gram per space, they will be able to do whatever they want with their loved one’s remaining ashes.

When Mitchell left Blue Origin last year, he said he filled “several pages” of a notebook with ideas for what to do next. The range was wide, with options like trying to become a launch director at another space company or becoming a cava bartender. Something kept pulling him in this direction though.

“I tried to talk myself out of it [this idea] For a long time I thought it would be too expensive or too difficult,” he explained. But he said it made sense to him “every time I put real engineering rigor into it, figuring out what the requirements were and what the business case was.”

It was also the idea that he was clearly most obsessed with. “My wife said: ‘I could have told you weeks ago. You can’t stop talking about this,'” he said.