Bay Area men’s ashes will now float in space with presidential hairs

Michael Lampton spent much of his adult life training to board a rocket ship. UC Berkeley’s first rocket scientist, he was booked for three NASA missions but health reasons and a cancellation prevented him from ever lifting off before his death, at 82, in June. 

Yesterday, though, a part of him finally traveled into space. 

The ashes of the Bay Area scientist are soaring into a heliocentric orbit with the remains or DNA of more than 260 people, including “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry, George Washington and two other American presidents. All are aboard the first-ever flight of the Vulcan Centaur rocket, which also carried a lunar lander and blasted off successfully from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on Monday, at 2:18 a.m. Eastern time after months of delays.

Jennifer Lea Lampton, Lampton’s daughter, told SFGATE a cancer diagnosis disqualified Lampton from his final scheduled mission to space in 1992. The family still went to its launch in Florida, she said. She remembers watching the shuttle leave as the saddest she’d ever seen her typically jolly father.

“I think the fact we’re finally getting him on that rocket is — it would mean a lot to him,” she said Thursday. United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin, aimed to launch the Vulcan rocket last summer, but delays let the Lampton family get Michael’s remains aboard.

The successful launch marks a new paradigm for Celestis, a Houston-based company that advertises various tiers of “Memorial Spaceflight.” The firm, charging $12,995 a participant, loaded the ashes and DNA samples aboard both the Vulcan rocket body — bound for orbit around the sun between Venus and Mars — and the lunar lander. But after the lander malfunctioned after the launch, it was unclear whether it would make it to the moon as of Monday afternoon.

Celestis didn’t sell out the orbit-bound capsule Lampton’s ashes are on, company president Colby Youngblood told SFGATE on Thursday, but the executive was delighted about the project, especially the inclusion of Lampton and Australian astronaut Philip Chapman, who helped with NASA’s Apollo 14 mission.

“We’re all space lovers here at Celestis,” Youngblood said. “That’s a pretty solid honor for us to be able to give these two astronauts their final, first and final, ride in space.”

The company waived the fees for the families of Roddenberry and two “Star Trek” stars: Majel Barrett, the voice of most ship computers and Roddenberry’s wife, and Scotty actor James Doohan. 

The rocket also carried a hair each from Presidents George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, which were gifted to Celestis, plus DNA samples from company workers and digital copies of Word documents, songs and art. Youngblood called it a “cosmic archive time capsule.”

Becki Leahy traveled from Martinez, California, to Cape Canaveral to watch Monday’s launch. Her husband, Dan, died suddenly in 2021, but he’d left Becki with straightforward instructions. 

“He wanted to go into space,” she told SFGATE. “I was like, ‘Is that really a thing?’” 

Dan had assured Becki it was possible, and after he passed away, she found Celestis. She’d held his memorial at the Pleasant Hill Community Center, and hadn’t sprung for a fancy coffin — the trip to Florida, with Dan’s daughter Alex, was a “bittersweet” celebration, she said.

“That there’s members of ‘Star Trek’ that are a part of this and even other historical figures, it’s beyond special,” Leahy said. “It’s nothing that I could have ever imagined could actually be possible.” 

Reminiscing, Leahy said that Dan, a “Star Trek” fan and former Martinez city council candidate,  had even given her a little astronomy lesson on their first date.

It’s a familiar origin story: Michael Lampton’s wife, Susan Lea Lampton, told SFGATE she first met the astronaut-to-be at an astronomy party thrown by her Berkeley thesis adviser. He was “gorgeous,” she said, and the couple’s respective careers in physics and rocket science provided their daughter Jennifer with a childhood of head-spinning dinner table conversations. 

Last summer, when Jennifer and Susan were considering sending Michael’s remains to space, Jennifer said she wished she had gauged her dad’s interest before he passed away. But then she realized she had the next closest person.

“I immediately turned to her and said, ‘Mom, do you want to go to space?’” Jennifer said. “Without a hesitation she was like, ‘Absolutely. Yes.’”

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