Kenneth Chang’s assignment from the New York Times was to write about the successful Monday morning launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, of a new rocket that is sending a payload to the moon. And he covered that topic admirably, describing the Vulcan Centaur rocket which is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and a competitor for Elon Musk’s Space X launchers. The payload is a robot that will land on “Sinus Viscositatis — Latin for ‘Bay of Stickiness’ — an enigmatic region on the near side of the moon.”

The main payload for the first launch of Vulcan was Peregrine, a spacecraft built by Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh. Astrobotic, founded in 2007, is one of several private companies aiming to provide a delivery service to the surface of the moon. Its primary customer for this trip is NASA, which paid Astrobotic $108 million to carry five experiments. That is part of the scientific work the space agency is conducting to prepare for the return of the astronauts to the moon under the Artemis program.

But all of this is only of interest to space and rocket geeks. The real news came way down in the 22nd paragraph of Chang’s piece.

Vulcan also lifted a secondary payload for Celestis, a company that memorializes people by sending some of their ashes or DNA into space. Two toolbox-size containers attached to the Vulcan’s upper stage house small cylindrical capsules.

Among the people whose remains are on this final journey are Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek; his wife, Majel Barrett, who played Nurse Chapel on the original television show; and three other actors on the show: DeForest Kelley, who played the medical officer Leonard “Bones” McCoy; Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, the communications officer; and James Doohan, who played Montgomery Scott, the chief engineer.

One of the capsules contains samples of hair from three American presidents: George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy.

A final brief engine firing sent the second stage and the Celestis memorial into orbit around the sun.

When thinking about the fact that Gene Roddenberry and his wife, Bones, Scotty and Lt. Uhuru are now in orbit around the Sun, along with hair from three presidents, I couldn’t help think about a line from the Grateful Dead’s Golden Road (to Unlimited Devotion):

Well, everybody’s dancin’ in a ring around the sun
Nobody’s finished, we ain’t even begun.
So take off your shoes, child, and take off your hat.
Try on your wings and find out where it’s at.

Talk about burying the lede!

Of course, they just traded one solar orbit for another one.