Lunar Burials Are a Real Thing That Exist

By Marie Lodi  |  August 25, 2015 | 3:45am
Latest

Now you can save your loved ones the stress of planning your funeral by having your remains sent to the moon. A company called Elysium Space has created small metallic cubes that can hold cremated remains. They will launch clusters of these cubes into outer space, where they will soft land on the moon’s surface. So, when you say goodbye to this earthly plane, you can now literally leave it.

Elysium offers two other memorial services besides the moon burial. Via Fortune:

The Shooting Star Memorial will send the capsules into low-Earth orbit, allowing them to return to Earth as a shooting star, while the Milky Way Memorial will send capsules in the opposite direction into deep space.

As for pricing, the first 50 reservations will cost $9,950. If you think that sounds hefty, it’s not too different from a regular funeral. According to the National Funeral Director’s Association, the average cost of a funeral in 2012 was $7,045.

Tech Crunch reports that Elysium already has their first lunar burial:

Steve Jenks, an infantryman in the Iraq war, will be one of the first people to purchase the lunar burial memorial service. He’s doing so in honor of his mother, who lost her battle with cancer. When he was overseas she ended every letter she sent him with the following: “No matter how lonely you feel and how far you are, always look at the Moon and know I am with you. I love you to the Moon and back.”

Sounds like the perfect tribute to me.

Contact the author at [email protected].

Image via Claudio Divizia/ Shutterstock.

 
Join the discussion...