ST. CLAIR COUNTY, Mich. – One family felt a formal funeral wasn’t the best way to say a final farewell to their dad. They say he loved outer space and science fiction and once worked for NASA.
After a year of planning and rescheduling, Holly Hutton says her father, John Hutton’s ashes were sent to outer space during the SpaceX launch Tuesday (Jan. 3).
“My dad was really into education and teaching me about space,” said Hutton. “So now I get to continue to learn from my dad about space, which I love.”
Hutton admits she doesn’t know much about outer space other than how much her dad loved it.
“My dad was super, super smart, and very funny,” Hutton said. “And he worked for NASA for a little bit, but mainly he was into computers.”
He died in February 2022, about four months after his pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Hutton says her father was a U.S. Airforce veteran and regretted not becoming a pilot.
Before John Hutton’s death, the family agreed to release his ashes over an ocean, but then his funeral home showed them another option, space.
“You can turn ashes into like a necklace, like a charm or something,” Holly Hutton said. “They’re (funeral home staff) like, ‘Oh, yeah, there’s space,’ and he (staff member) kind of brushed it off as like, ‘Oh, yeah. Nobody buys that,’ and I’m like, ‘Whoa, I want to know about the space. Tell me about the space thing.”
It’s called the shooting star package.
“What that means is he goes up in the rocket, he orbits around for a year, and then he will come back and fall back out of the orbit as a shooting star,” said Hutton.
She says his launch was rescheduled multiple times due to weather, but this week, it happened. Hutton says it’s the first space launch of the year, making the moment even more special.
Hutton says she can watch her father’s vessel orbit around earth online, and that feature makes it feel like their family has a little more time with him.
“My son is five, and he’s so young, and he’s not going to really have a ton of memories of his grandpa,” Hutton said. “This, for me, just means that we can have a longer time to make those memories, even if they’re different and not exactly what I would prefer those memories to be like.”