For the first time since the Apollo missions, there is serious talk of more manned spaceflight missions, and it is raising an important question: When someone dies in space, what do you do with the body? A mission to Mars would require several months of travel just to get there.
The simplest solution is to just pop the ship's airlock and send the body floating out into the vacuum of space, as in Spock's funeral in Star Trek.
A UN agreement says you can't litter in space, and that includes dumping bodies.
That's because bodies floating through space could collide with other spacecraft or even float over to alien planets and effectively colonize them with human remains and whatever bacteria and other organisms may be living on and in the body.One of the most interesting proposals for dealing with death in space is a collaboration between the green burial company Promessa and NASA that spawned the idea of the 'Body Back'.
Body Back involves an airtight sleeping bag that a human corpse is zipped into and then exposed to the freezing temperatures of outer space.
"I mean, no society has done that on Earth that I know of. There are societies that desperately need fertilizer, and even they don't use their dead bodies for the purpose. There's always been an extremely strong taboo for using dead bodies for instrumental purposes." Death is a deeply human issue, but for long-term spaceflight it has to also be treated as a cost issue and a practicality issue.
The simplest solution is to just pop the ship's airlock and send the body floating out into the vacuum of space, as in Spock's funeral in Star Trek.
A UN agreement says you can't litter in space, and that includes dumping bodies.
That's because bodies floating through space could collide with other spacecraft or even float over to alien planets and effectively colonize them with human remains and whatever bacteria and other organisms may be living on and in the body.One of the most interesting proposals for dealing with death in space is a collaboration between the green burial company Promessa and NASA that spawned the idea of the 'Body Back'.
Body Back involves an airtight sleeping bag that a human corpse is zipped into and then exposed to the freezing temperatures of outer space.
"I mean, no society has done that on Earth that I know of. There are societies that desperately need fertilizer, and even they don't use their dead bodies for the purpose. There's always been an extremely strong taboo for using dead bodies for instrumental purposes." Death is a deeply human issue, but for long-term spaceflight it has to also be treated as a cost issue and a practicality issue.
