Startup offers chance to send your spit to the moon
Going to the moon, once a giant leap for mankind, now costs only $99.
But your entire body doesn’t get to go, however. For $99, the only part of you that gets to make the trip is a tiny droplet of your spit.
“Send a piece of you to the moon,” says the sales pitch on the website for the Life Ship company. “Your spaceship is now boarding!”
It’s all part of a new offer from starryeyed San Francisco entrepreneur Ben Haldeman, who has cut a deal with a commercial spacecraft company to put tiny fragments of human saliva aboard a privately funded United Launch Alliance lunar landing, scheduled to lift off from Cape Canaveral in the fall. Each spit droplet, according to the company, will contain the customer’s entire DNA sequence.
“You get to go on a space mission and send a piece of you where few have been,” Haldeman said. “You save your family’s genes for the future.”
Haldeman, a 40yearold engineer and former profes
sional bike racer, said he got into the sendyourspittothemoon business to help planet Earth save itself from self destruction and to enable human beings — the ones with $99, anyway — to perhaps live forever.
Future scientists, he said, most earnestly, may very well come across the tiny bits of preserved spit on the moon and have the wherewithal to reconstruct entire people from them. He said it could work some
thing like the dinosaurs in the “Jurassic Park” movies, which were based on genuine makebelieve.
“I’m not really making any money on this,” he said. “I haven’t paid myself a salary yet.”
So far, Haldeman said, about 1,000 people have ponied up their $99 via his website and licked the postagepaid saliva collection card.
A lab in Berkeley extracts DNA strands from the spit and crams them — with all the other customers’ processed spit — into a 2gram kernel of resin about the size of a pistachio nut. That’s the part that will go in the spaceship.
The DNA of 1,000 people crammed together into something the size of a pistachio nut? Isn’t that a tight fit?
“So was Noah’s ark,” said Haldeman.
And the offer is not just for the living, Haldeman said. Dead people can go to the moon too, providing they’ve been cremated. The cost to send an eversos mall smidgen of cremains to the moon — about one 30,000th of an ounce — is $399.
No, Haldeman said, it’s not like freezing your body in a giant thermos bottle, which was all the rage a few years back among people who thought living another few lifetimes might be just the thing. DNA sequencing is real. The moon launch is real. And his expenses are real. For example, each $399 kit for sending ashes to the moon comes with an elegant wooden spoon, which, the instructions say, is for transferring a small dollop of a loved one’s ashes into the postagepaid envelope. You get to keep the spoon.
The first batch of samples has been collected, according to the company’s website, and are set to board the first mission scheduled for later this year. The next batch will board a second launch, planned for later this year or 2022. That part, like rebuilding people from their spit, hasn’t been finalized.
When it comes to immortality, Haldeman said, everyone has questions. They’re all answered on the website.
“What could my DNA be used for?” said one question.
“Perhaps it will be retrieved after an asteroid strike to repopulate earth,” Haldeman wrote. “Maybe it could be carried to the stars and seed a new world.”
“What if the rocket ship blows up?” says another.
“Space is hard,” Haldeman wrote in reply. “Rockets do explode. If you don’t make it to the Moon then you’ll go again on our next mission for free.”