This Is What It's Like To Spread Your Ashes From Space

As a mortal human with a finite amount of time on this Earth, contemplating death is probably one of the least-productive ways to spend any part of your day. Until now.

Because the new company Mesoloft has unveiled a fantastical final send-off service where you or your loved one's ashes are dropped from 20 miles up by a giant balloon at the precipice of outer space. 

Helmed by a team with backgrounds in aerospace engineering and satellites, the commemorative packages begin on the ground with a small container filled with remains securely supplied by a funeral home. That's then attached—along with a mounted GoPro camera and a special deploy device—to a giant weather balloon, and launched at the location of you or your loved ones' choosing.

Depending on the status of the winds in the area, the full journey lasts roughly two hours (including retrieval), as it ascends to the designated 75,000 feet and the custom payload urn releases the contents. They scatter slowly across a wide swatch of sky, followed shortly thereafter by balloon and camera. If you're lucky, the ashes will pass through clouds containing supercooled water, and return to the Earth in the form of rain drops or snow flakes. Science, FTW!

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Like any other funeral service, it's not cheap, starting at nearly $3,000 for the entry level package and going up to $7,500 for the fully custom, more premium job. You obviously won't be capable of relaying how well worth the money the wild ride was, but you won't have to since your surviving family and friends can watch the whole thing any time they want.


Joe McGauley is a seriously space-phobic senior editor at Supercompressor.