Jacob Battersby, 26, from Stockport, and his friend Callum King, 26, from Rugby, sent the ashes of Battersby's French bulldog Oscar 119,000ft into space on a weather balloon, after the dog died suddenly from a brain tumour.
Oscar's ashes were launched alongside his favourite Toy Story alien toy and a pet GPS tracker. The balloon lifted off from Rugby, Warwickshire, at 2.24pm on May 7, 2026, carrying cameras that recorded the entire flight along with a GPS tracker made by the pair's company, Zoomi, housed inside a custom-built payload box.
"Oscar couldn't see the world, so we decided to show the world Oscar," King said.
"Jacob lost Oscar at the start of the year and it came completely out of the blue. He had a brain tumour and it happened so quickly. When we started planning the launch, taking his ashes up there wasn't really a question. It was just how we were going to do it. It felt like one last adventure for him."
Balloon climbs to edge of atmosphere
The balloon climbed to around 119,000ft before bursting near the edge of Earth's atmosphere, scattering Oscar's ashes. The payload then descended by parachute, touching down shortly after 7pm, 55 miles from the launch site near Nottinghamshire.
The pair had expected the journey to last around two hours. When the balloon stayed airborne far longer than planned, they feared it had been lost for good and abandoned the search.
"We thought we'd lost it. We'd gone to the pub because there was nothing else we could do. Then suddenly the GPS tracker pinged with a location," King said. "We drove straight there and ended up walking through fields until we found the payload. It was an amazing feeling."
A test for their pet tracking company
The flight doubled as a real-world test of the tracker developed by Zoomi, the pet GPS and health tracking company Battersby and King launched last month. Recovering the payload proved the device had worked as intended.
"Finding it proved not only that Oscar had completed his final journey, but that our tracker had done exactly what it was designed to do," King said.
The pair first met at the Insomnia Gaming Festival in 2016, before later founding Zoomi. Before Oscar became ill, Battersby had hoped to travel the world with him, but the pair never got the chance.
An unfinished school project, revisited
Wanting to create a lasting tribute, the pair decided to combine Oscar's memorial with a weather balloon launch, something King had unsuccessfully attempted while at school years earlier.
"I'd done a weather balloon launch years ago at school and we never recovered the payload," King said. "It always stayed with me because we'd got all this incredible footage but never knew where it had ended up. So being able to come back years later, build our own payload, send something to the edge of space and recover it ourselves was incredibly satisfying."
He added: "There's actually a surprising amount of maths involved. We had to calculate the amount of helium, predict where it would travel and build the payload ourselves. We expected it to be in the air for around two hours, so when that time passed we genuinely thought it had gone forever."
Space burials on the rise in the UK
Battersby and King are not the first to send ashes into space. Jane Berwick sent the ashes of her husband, Mark, into space after he unexpectedly passed away.
Space burials are becoming more popular in the UK. In March, UK-based space burial company Aura Flights revealed it had launched 350 flights since starting in 2017. Its process loads ashes into a specially designed capsule, attaches it to a hydrogen balloon and carries it to the edge of space, where they are scattered into the stratosphere, 100,000ft (32,500m) above the ground, at a cost of £3,950, on top of the price of a cremation and funeral.
Samantha Richardson, General Manager of Aura Flights, told the Daily Mail that the company is receiving more inquiries from people planning for their deaths well in advance, with some customers making arrangements in their 30s and 40s.
"In general, people seem to be moving away from traditional burial practices and looking for something a bit more personalised or modern," Richardson said. "Instead of being a quiet, sombre event, it's a celebration of their life, and so they're looking for something that connects with their personality, their way of life, and the life they lived."
What happens to ashes released into space
Most space burials are suborbital, meaning the ashes do not remain in orbit but fall back to Earth, carried by gravity and wind. UK firm Ascension Flights, which offers space burials at £800 ($1,044), says on its website that as the particles return to Earth, precipitation forms around them, creating raindrops and snowflakes, and that small amounts of nutritious chemicals stimulate plant growth wherever they land.
Some space burials scatter ashes upon reaching the stratosphere, while others place a small rocket capsule containing the ashes into orbit, where it remains for several years until it burns up in the atmosphere. Around 670 people have had their ashes sent into space on official flights with Nasa and space burial companies including Elysium Space and Celestis, with some remains scattered in Earth's orbit and others sent to the moon or deep space. The total number of space burials is likely higher, since many weather balloon flights launched by members of the public go unrecorded.
