'Star Trek' actor's ashes beamed aboard International Space Station

Ashes of the late actor James Doohan, Scotty from the TV series "Star Trek" and its spinoffs, have been resting in the International Space Station for the past dozen years, the actor's son and an accomplice private astronaut have revealed.

"My dad had three passions: space, science and trains," Christopher Doohan, 61, a son of James Doohan and the actor's first wife Janet Young, told the London newspaper The Times on Friday. "He always wanted to go into space."

Computer-gaming entrepreneur Richard Garriott, 59, who in 2008 spent 12 days board the ISS as the sixth private astronaut there, told the newspaper the mission to smuggle Doohan's ashes aboard "was completely clandestine." He said that days before launching on a Russian Soyuz flight, he had been contacted by Christopher Doohan with the request. "I said 'I'm in quarantine in Kazakhstan … but if you can get the ashes to me, I'll find a way of getting them aboard,' " Garriott recalled. "A couple of days before flight, this package arrived and I made a plan."

Garriott laminated three photographs of Doohan, who died in 2005 at age 85, with the ashes inside, and placed them inside his flight data file. "Everything that officially goes on board is logged, inspected and bagged — there's a process," Garriott said, "but there was no time to put it through that process."

Christopher Doohan, an actor who reprises his father's role as Starship Enterprise Chief Engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott on the web series "Star Trek Continues," told The Times, "Richard said 'We've got 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."

The Times article included a video that Garriott had made aboard the ISS for the Doohan family. "I just wanted you to know: Mission accomplished," he says in it. "Your father has made it here into space …. I'm very proud to have had the chance to do this for you and for your family and for your father. It's very special to me and I know it was something that your father wished for and you've tried to make happen, and I can't tell you how proud I am to be able to do this."

Garriott floated one card into space, returned one to give to Christopher Doohan, and secretly placed the third "under the cladding on the floor of the space station's Columbus module," the newspaper said. Christopher Doohan on Saturday tweeted a photo of "the laminated card that @RichardGarriott gave to me."

The family had attempted to send James Doohan spaceward before, with his and others' remains reaching the edge of space on the commercial SpaceLoft XL rocket in 2007 before parachuting back to Earth. The following year, Doohan's and others' ashes were aboard a SpaceX Falcon 1 rocket that malfunctioned and failed to reach space. But a 2012 SpaceX Falcon 9 flight in 2012 did carry the remains of Doohan and other people in a payload that orbited for a year before burning as planned on reentry.