Attention all budding Buzz Lightyears, you can now jet into space for a snip of the Virgin Galactic price. There's just one catch...
It was every kid's dream to ape Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and, you know... that other guy, and zip round the galaxy as an astronaut. And with initiatives such as Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and Lynx Apollo, space travel's never seemed more accessible for the itchy-footed everyman.
Yet, unless you have £250,000 to spare for SRB's maiden voyage - planned for Christmas Day of this year - or possess the jammy luck to be plucked from millions and jet off with Lynx, it seems we're still a fair way off having kickabouts on Neptune and Saturn timeshares.
But, a company called Elysium Space could just be about to change all that, offering cut-price galaxy tours for as little as £1,290. However, there's but one condition: you sort of have to be a little bit dead first.
Pitching themselves as a, "unique team of space and funeral experts", Elysium Space want to blast your dearly departed's ashes into the stratosphere on the next available spacecraft (with the first launch penciled for summer 2014). The rocket/your loved one then orbits the Earth for anything from a couple of months to several years, before re-entering the Earth's atmosphere - as they put it - "blazing as a shooting star" (or a high-speed ball of flames, if you prefer).
Just in case that wasn't enough excitement for an intergalactic space corpse, each capsule of ashes can be fully personalised with initials and remembrance message, with the spacecraft's journey available to track via a free smartphone app, so you can pinpoint exactly what (and where) your perished loved one is up to, years after they've gone.
So, on the off-chance affordable space travel isn't available in your lifetime, you can now live safe in the knowledge that in death, it will be*. Which frankly, is a big relief.
