INDIANAPOLIS — Clarice Terry Brown grew up in a segregated America, the daughter of a domestic worker and coal miner and sharecropper from Tennessee.
She was just a young girl in the 1940s when her family moved to Indianapolis, decades before man would walk on the moon.
By the time the world witnessed that giant leap for mankind, Brown was already working as a clerk-typist and raising a family.
“She was of a generation that didn’t have the kind of opportunities to pursue careers in the space field or science and so she basically got interested in science fiction as a result of that,” Brown’s daughter, Carlotta Arthur explained.
Brown passed away three years ago at the age of 86.
Arthur said she remembers trips to the local planetarium as a kid with her mom and other siblings, just to gaze at the stars.
“Unfortunately, we were not able to afford a telescope,” Arthur said.
That didn’t stop Brown from dreaming about the heavens above.
“She always wanted to travel among the stars. Mae Jemison, the astronaut who was the first African American woman to go into space, was a huge inspiration to my mom,” said Arthur. “She always said that she really wished she could have traveled to the stars and she didn’t have that opportunity.”
That’s about to change next month.
Brown’s children will help their mom fulfill a dream deferred when they send some of her cremated remains into space aboard a rocket.
“This is, frankly, a dream come true in a lot of ways," said Arthur. "Unfortunately, not during her actual lifetime, but it’s a close second."
“When you think about it, it’s not all that different than scattering ashes at sea,” said Charles Chafer, CEO and co-founder of Celestis, Inc, the company in charge of the flight.
Since its creation in 1994, Celestis has flown 18 similar missions. The rocket launch with Brown’s cremains will cost around $2,500.
“It was almost exactly the same cost of getting a small mausoleum space for her ashes,” said Arthur. “For us, it was a no-brainer."
A capsule containing the cremains will travel 72 miles into the air before it hits space. Then, they’ll be parachuted back to Earth with capsules containing the cremains of others.
Celestis also offers other missions that cost more, like sending a loved one’s ashes to the moon or deep space, never to return to Earth again.
“What I tell people is, you don’t ever go to a funeral and see as much cheering and hi-fiving as you do at our launches,” Chafer explained.
The mission Brown’s cremains will be a part of launches in New Mexico next month. Her family will watch the launch live online.
“I think it’s beyond all our wildest dreams,” said Arthur.
Certainly, beyond the dreams of Clarice Terry Brown, who used to gaze at the stars and wish she could be among them.
“I think she’d be thrilled," Arthur said. "I think she would say, ‘I finally made it, I made it into outer space.’”
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