Evidently "Star Trek" actor James "Scotty" Doohan took the catch phrase "beam me up" very seriously — his cremated remains will be launched into space in accordance with his last wishes.

Commercial space flight operator Space Services Inc. will launch the late actor's remains into space aboard its Explorers Flight on Dec. 6, a company spokeswoman said Friday.

She said the remains of more than 120 others will be aboard the flight, including those of an unidentified astronaut and Mareta West, the astrogeologist who determined the site for the first spacecraft landing on the moon. * * *

"Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry also had his remains shot into space after his death in 1991. They returned to Earth in 2002, Schonfeld said.

Doohan's cremated remains will be packed into a special tube that is ejected from the rocket and expected to orbit Earth for about 50 to 200 years before plunging into the planet's atmosphere and burning up.

A 1999 study estimated there are some 4 million pounds of space junk in low-Earth orbit, just one part of a celestial sea of roughly 110,000 objects larger than 1 centimeter — each big enough to damage a satellite or space-based telescope.

Some of the objects, baseball-sized and bigger, could threaten the lives of astronauts in a space shuttle or the International Space Station. As an example of the hazard, a tiny speck of paint from a satellite once dug a pit in a space shuttle window nearly a quarter-inch wide.

Aware of the threat, the U.S. Space Command monitors space debris and other objects, reporting directly to NASA and other agencies whenever there's threat of an orbital impact.

As of June 21 2000, the agency counted 8,927 man-made objects in the great above and beyond; some are there more or less permanently. Of the total, 2,671 are satellites (working or not), 90 are space probes that have been launched out of Earth orbit, and 6096 are mere chunks of debris zooming around the third planet from the Sun. The United States leads the former Soviet Union in the total quantity of orbital junk, but some companies and other organizations contribute significantly to the count.

But there are more objects up there [too small to be seen by existing devices].

Controlling the growth of the orbital debris population is a high priority for NASA, the United States, and the major space-faring nations of the world to preserve near-Earth space for future generations. Mitigation measures can take the form of curtailing or preventing the creation of new debris, designing satellites to withstand impacts by small debris, and implementing operational procedures ranging from utilizing orbital regimes with less debris, adopting specific spacecraft attitudes, and even maneuvering to avoid collisions with debris.

- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:09 PM