TAMPA, Fla. — Florida-based Space Beyond plans to start building its first memorial spacecraft next week after booking a launch on SpaceX’s October 2027 rideshare mission.
Ryan Mitchell, a former Blue Origin engineer who founded Space Beyond last year, said the startup is in final design review for a brick-sized cubesat designed to carry around 1,000 symbolic portions of human or pet remains sealed in Kapton film.
The venture has signed an agreement to use Arrow Science & Technology’s XTERRA XCD deployer to place the spacecraft into sun-synchronous orbit, where it would remain for around five years before reentering Earth’s atmosphere.
Mitchell said Space Beyond is self-funding its debut mission, following a Kickstarter campaign last year that reached…