The team that put Gene Roddenberry's ashes into space will send a sample of your hair outside the solar system for $50. Unless you're an Air Force space chimp, in which case your hair may go for free.

A group called Team Encounter is developing a solar sailing ship, which it plans to launch on an Ariane rocket sometime in 2004. The solar wind is expected to carry it beyond the outer planets in 14 years or so.

You can buy a kit for $24.95 to send a note and a photo along for the ride. For $49.95, your kit can include a bit of hair, so your DNA gets to go, too.

Team Encounter is a project of Encounter 2001 LLC, which is an af filiate of Celestis Inc., a privately owned space company in Houston. The project also has the support of two other engineering firms, Aero-Astro Inc. of Boston and L'Garde Inc. of Tustin, Calif.

Celestis offers to send portions of cremated remains into orbit, into deep space, or onto the surface of the moon. Seven grams of Roddenberry, the man behind Star Trek, were sent into orbit in Celestis's first launch, in April 1997, lofted by a Pegasus rocket released from the belly of an L-1011 over Spain. In that same payload were some of the remains of Timothy Leary, the legendary apologist for psychedelia.

At that time, mourners paid $4,800 for each portion of ashes sent into orbit. The price is up to $5,300 now. The Earth orbit is expected to last at least 10 years.

There have been no commercial transactions for the moon or deep space yet. Those deliveries go for $12,500.

The Encounter spacecraft will open its solar sail and then leave its orbital carrier for a journey beyond the solar system.

In response to a request by NASA employees, Celestis arranged to place ashes of Eugene Shoemaker, a co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which hit Jupiter in 1994, on a lunar orbiter. The orbiter was intentionally crashed onto the moon in 1999, making Shoemaker the first human being laid to rest there.

According to Chris Pancheri, a spokesman for Celestis, the Encounter sailcraft will have room for 4.5 million messages, after the notes and images are laser-etched on a disk in microscopic scale. A sellout of the disk space, even at a rockbottom $25 a pop, would come to more than $112 million. The project is budgeted to cost about $25 million.
The company is also selling corporate sponsorships.

The Ariane will carry the furled solar sail into a geosynchronous transfer orbit. Once there, the sail will ride on a powered carrier until it is oriented for its long voyage. The sail will deploy on inflatable booms.

The opening of the sail, which is the size of about one and a half football fields, will be carried back to Earth on a live video feed, Pancheri said.

Prime spots on camera will be offered for corporate logos. Encounter is also willing to rent space for small research experiments.

AeroAstro is providing the carrier, which measures a little more than half a meter in each dimension and has a mass of about 85 kilograms. When the sail is fully open, it will leave the carrier, at a distance of 64,000 km from the Earth, and head for open space, propelled by the solar wind. The sailcraft and payload together will have a total mass of less than 20 kg.

L'Garde is engineering the sail, which will be glued together of Mylar panels 900 nanometers thick. Its sun side will get a 30-nm-thick layer of aluminum, and the dark side 20 nm of chromium. According to L'Garde's vice president of engineering, Gordon Veal, the aluminum provides high reflectivity and the chromium high emissivity to control the sail's temperature.

To ride according to plan as secondary cargo on the Ariane, everything, including sail and carrier, has to fit a 60 x 60 x 71 cm package.

The company is billing the solar sail spacecraft as "humanity's first starship," and has publicized the project by linking it to another space-related event, the DVD release of Planet of the Apes.

In a joint promotion with 20th Century Fox, the Encounter group will include hair samples from a total of 37 chimpanzees who either served in the Air Force's space program or are descendants of space chimps. The chimps also get to watch the movie.

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