
Ten days after Shoemaker's passing, Porco had the go-ahead from NASA administrators and delivered the ashes to the Lunar Prospector Mission Director Scott Hubbard at the NASA Ames Research Center. Shoemaker's former colleague Carolyn Porco, a University of Arizona professor, proposed and produced the tribute of having Shoemaker's ashes launched aboard the NASA's Lunar Prospector spacecraft. Eugene Shoemaker, a portion of whose cremated remains were flown to the Moon by NASA. The remains do not burn up and are either recovered or lost. Short flights that cross the boundary of space without attempting to reach orbital velocity are a cost-effective method of space burial. Famous people on this flight included Gene Roddenberry and Timothy Leary. The rocket then carried the remains into an elliptical orbit with an apogee of 578 km (359 mi) and a perigee of 551 km (342 mi), orbiting the Earth once every 96 minutes until re-entry on May 20, 2002, northeast of Australia.

An aircraft departing from the Canary Islands carried a Pegasus rocket containing samples of the remains of 24 people to an altitude of 11 km (6.8 mi) above the Atlantic Ocean. The first private space burial, Celestis' Earthview 01: The Founders Flight, was launched on April 21, 1997. The first space burial occurred in 1992 when the NASA Space Shuttle Columbia (mission STS-52) carried a sample of Gene Roddenberry's cremated remains into space and returned them to Earth. Gene Roddenberry (third from the right) in 1976 with most of the cast of Star Trek at the rollout of the Space Shuttle Enterprise at the Rockwell International plant at Palmdale, California, USA Maiden flights
