A Final Turn-on Lifts Timothy Leary Off
By Marlise Simons

MASPALOMAS, Canary Islands, April 21 — Toward the end of his life, Timothy Leary talked of death as the final trip and of outer space as the great new frontier.

Today, 10 months after “de-animating,” as he called it, he left this planet with a blast, on his next adventure.

In a new episode in space travel, not to mention the funeral business, a rocket carrying a capsule of his ashes and those of 23 others was launched from Grand Canary Island off the Moroccan coast.
The remains, taken aloft in an American Pegasus rocket, will or bit every 90 minutes for perhaps 2 years, perhaps as many as 10.

“I can hear Timothy laughing,” said Carol Rosin, a friend, who had accompanied the ashes and was observing the liftoff at a Spanish tracking station. “He would have loved to have seen this.”
Mr. Leary, who died last May after decades of surprising and outraging Americans with his advocacy of mind expansion through drug use, finally left this earth in auspicious company. Also aloft in the world’s first space funeral were fragments of Gene Roddenberry, who created the “Star Trek” television series; Gerard O’Neill, a space physicist, and scientists and pilots.

One vial held the remains of a Japanese-American boy, 4, from New York, who his parents said “loved to talk about the stars.”

The official purpose of the rocket, launched from a Lockheed L 1011 airplane, was to put Spain’s first satellite into space. But bolted to the rocket’s third-stage motor was a canister containing the ashes of the 24 people in aluminum capsules, each one engraved with the person’s name and a commemorative phrase.
“They look like little cocaine vials, which is kind of hysterical in Timothy’s case,” Ms. Rosin said.

The arrangements were made by Celestis Inc. of Houston. For its “memorial service in space,” Celestis charged $4,800 per vial, which includes the fare paid to Orbital Sciences Corporation, the spacecraft’s owner.

“We consider these the pioneers, the members of the Founding Flight,” said Charles Chafer, a co-owner of Celestis. “These people will open the path for others.” Mr. Chafer, who has long been involved with space projects, said it was unfortunate that all the “founders,” however deeply they had been interested in the space program, could only make their journey in death. “That’s all that’s possible at the moment,” he added, “until space travel becomes normal.”

And so it was that those who watched this first-of-a-kind ritual on the site of Spain’s National Institute for Space Technology included Spanish generals in uniform, representatives of Celestis in dark suits, video crews and American space technicians, one of whom pronounced the dispatch of ashes into space “a really neat idea, but my wife wants me in a place where she can visit me.”

Among the witnesses was also Paula Lamkin of Louisville, Ky., whose father’s ashes were likewise fixed to the rocket. As the spacecraft veered away from the African coast and headed west and a voice announced its entry into orbit, Ms. Lamkin sobbed loudly with relief, causing some consternation among the generals.
“It has taken such a long time to get Dad into space,” she said of her father, Omer, who died in 1985.
That year, after reading about a company that was offering to take ashes into space, Mr. Lamkin told his daughter, “That is what I want,” she said. But the company went broke.

“My sister and I just didn’t know what to do,” said Ms. Lamkin, explaining that in the meantime she had kept her father’s ashes in a safe-deposit box. “This is it,” she smiled. “His soul was already up there, and now I can look up and grin.”

Ms. Rosin said she felt “honored and awed” that she had been “able to get a portion of Timothy into space.” In his later years, she said, he was deeply interested not only in “inner space” but in the heavens. He said and wrote that like it or not, people would go into outer space and mi grate, but that space should be re served for peaceful purposes.

“I know that’s why he called on me, to get him into space and to get his message out,” said Ms. Rosin, an aerospace defense executive until she became an activist for the peaceful use of space.

“Space was one of the symbols of freedom for him,” she recalled, de scribing a moment several weeks be fore his death when she and Mr. Leary, by then 75 and weak with prostate cancer, were looking at the sky and he blurted out, “Carol, I want you to get me into space.” Ms. Rosin said she found out about Celestis through friends at NASA.

“When Timothy learned that he would go into space along with other pioneers,” she said, “he was so excited he jumped up and down in his wheelchair.”
“He was also thrilled that he would not become space junk,” said Ms. Rosin. She noted that in its promotional video, Celestis said the rocket’s re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere would create such friction that the vehicle would burn up.

For Mr. Leary, she said, the video reached its high point when it showed a rocket re-entering the atmosphere with a great burst of light. “That’s it!” he shouted. “We are all light! We are all light-bearers and we must shine it on others!”

The others whose remains were along on the ride shared Mr. Leary’s interest in space, if not all of his ideas about its uses.

Gerard O’Neill, a physicist, had wanted his ashes scattered on a space colony, but given the long wait, Mr. Chafer said, his relatives went with this option. Relatives of Gene Roddenberry, who died in 1991, sent his ashes traveling on a space shuttle, but they were returned to Earth.

“It struck me that all 24 on the flight are men,” Mr. Chafer said, “yet most of the contacts or the decisions were made by women. And in one way or another they said that in a spiritual sense this was a great way for their loved ones to join the universe.”

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