Reprinted with alterations from World at Large, an independent news outlet that covers conflict, nature, travel, health and fitness, and more.

The DNA of George Washington will join that of the creator of Star Trek on a spacecraft for launch later this year

Hair samples from Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Regan, and a completed human genome are also onboard "Humanity's first deep space time capsule," set to be launched into space on a rocket carrying an important lunar lander as a primary mission.

Houston "memorial spaceflight" company Celestis Inc. typically blasts urns of cremated ashes into space.

This year's Enterprise Mission reflects most of what's great about the modern space industry, and science-fiction fans.

When Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry died in 1991, it was 6 years later that some of his ashes were launched into deep space by Celetis in what most people found a fitting end for the science-fiction titan.

Now his wife, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, who passed away in 2008, will join her husband's ashes floating around space when hers are launched aboard a "Vulcan" rocket.

As well as being sent up to space with the ashes of Star Trek actor, James "Scotty" Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, a DeForest Kelly, the mission will also be sporting a state-of-the-art moon lander designed by Astrobotics for payload missions to the moon.

In total 150 ash-containing capsules will be launched into space, which also include the  Apollo astronaut Philip Chapman and special effects master Douglas Trumbull, who worked on 2001: A Space Oddysey, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. 

Altogether the payload is one that celebrates fiction and fact, as well as the unquenchable enthusiasm of space-bound firms and sci-fi fans, two groups that largely intersect; evidenced by the fact that the rocket is called a Vulcan, and the mission is called Enterprise.

"We're very pleased to be fulfilling, with this mission, a promise I made to Majel Barrett Roddenberry in 1997 that one day we would fly her and husband Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry together on a deep space memorial spaceflight," said Celestis Co-Founder and CEO Charles M. Chafer. "The mission is named Enterprise in tribute to them".

Later this year, a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan Centaur rocket on its maiden voyage will lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, and after putting the Peregrine 1 lunar lander on course for its rendezvous with the Moon, it will continue into a heliocentric (solar) orbit around the sun.

The Enterprise Flight will be renamed Enterprise Station once it arrives to become humankind's furthest outpost, where it will journey endlessly, "perhaps awaiting discovery by a distant in time civilization," says Celestis.

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