Actor James Doohan’s family is celebrating after keeping a major secret for the past 12 years.
The late Doohan, who famously portrayed chief engineer Montgomery “Scotty” Scott on the original TV series “Star Trek,” had his ashes smuggled aboard the International Space Station, where they fittingly float in space today.
“I have been keeping a secret for over 12 years,” Chris Doohan, one of the sons of the “Star Trek” actor wrote on Twitter, adding a link to a Dec. 25 article from the Times of London that revealed the secret. The Starship Enterprise engineer has travelled nearly 1.7 billion miles through space, orbiting Earth more than 70,000 times, after his ashes were hidden secretly on the International Space Station.
James Doohan as Lt. Commander Montgomery Scott in an episode of “Star Trek.”
Doohan died in 2005 at age 85 and always had dreamed in resting among the stars.
“My dad had three passions: space, science and trains. He always wanted to go into space,” Chris Doohan told the Times.
Richard Garriott, an entrepreneur and one of the first private citizens in space, says he smuggled James Doohan’s ashes onto the ISS in 2008 during a 12-day mission as a private astronaut in a plot concocted by Chris Doohan.
The caper entailed printing three cards with a Doohan photograph and laminating each with a sprinkling of ashes sealed inside hidden inside his flight data file.
“Everything that officially goes on board is logged, inspected and bagged — there’s a process, but there was no time to put it through that process,” Garriott told the Times.
One of the three cards is framed on a wall in Doohan’s California home, which Doohan tweeted Saturday.
Here is the laminated card that @RichardGarriott gave to me. #startrek @NASAJPL #nasa pic.twitter.com/MS4wv2DJoy
— Chris Doohan (@ChrisDoohan) December 26, 2020
Garriott floated another into space. The third is under the cladding on the floor of the space station’s Columbus module, where he hid it in 2008.
“As far as I know, no one has ever seen it there and no one has moved it,” Garriott said. “James Doohan got his resting place among the stars.”
Chris Doohan said he was told to “keep this hush-hush for a little while’ and here we are 12 years later. What he did was touching — it meant so much to me, so much to my family and it would have meant so much to my dad.”
