To The Cosmos! Arizona couple among hundreds sending DNA to space

PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) — A Valley couple will soon be among the first to head to space without physically going. This will be on the Enterprise Flight, which will carry their DNA into space. The spacecraft will also have ashes on board, including some famous people.

Arizona veterans Gerry and Liz Paulus will be launching their DNA into deep space, along with the DNA or ashes of 200 other people, including the founder of Star Trek and John F. Kennedy. The spacecraft carrying their DNA is expected to lift off from Cape Canaveral in Florida sometime within the next 30 to 45 days. “He walks in behind me and says, ‘Hey babe, what do you think about sending our DNA into outer space? And so I thought for three seconds, I’m like, ‘Yeah, totally let’s do that,’” Liz Paulus said.

Gerry and Liz Paulus have always wondered what it would be like to travel to space. “Space is so important to me and the exploration of it is so wonderful,” Gerry said.

A company called Celestis is making that possible with its very first deep space voyager mission. A spacecraft will be launched to land on the moon. Then, a rocket carrying capsules will launch from the spacecraft, joining other planets, comets, and more in our solar system. “It makes me smile to say, ‘Wow, I am going to be out there in some fashion.’ Maybe not the physical form, but I’m part of it,” Liz said.

Gerry explained how this is possible. “They sent us a kit, and we took a swab and filled out the identification for it and put the swab in the cylinder and mailed it off. What they did is turned that into a white powder so that it could withstand travel in outer space,” he said.

Colby Youngblood is the president of Celestis. He hand-delivered Gerry and Liz’s DNA to the rocket in Florida and gave it to the engineers to assemble into the spacecraft. “When someone gets cremated, we fly one gram of ash for the person, symbolic portion of a person,” he said. “Once the rocket gets the green light, they are going.”

Youngblood says this is an opportunity of a lifetime. For the families who are sending their loved one’s ashes into space, they have a way to stay involved. “We offer the ability to track the location of your loved one on our website, and we go through the process of tracking that so you can go and find your loved ones and see where they are over Earth at any point in time,” he explained.

Those interested in sending a loved one to space can contact the company for its upcoming mission, which is tentatively scheduled for 2025. For more info, you can visit their website.

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