The Only Man To Be Buried On the Moon (So Far)

The Man In The Moon

Believe it or not, one man is buried on the Moon. His name is Eugene Shoemaker, and he pioneered planetary science.

Since time immemorial cultures all across the surface of the Earth have seen a face in the side of the Moon facing us. Our curiosity getting the better of us, we have written all sorts of legends and fables about the identity of the man in the Moon and the story of how he got there. Dante wrote that Cain, the fratricidal figure, was banished to the Moon. In Chinese traditions, the goddess of the Moon, Chang’e winds up on the moon after drinking an immortality elixir.

The first man on the Moon, however, was Neil Armstrong in 1969. He and the other Apollo 11 astronauts explored the moon’s surface and gathered samples to bring home. These samples were of particular interest to the man who would eventually end up interred on the Moon.

Many credit Eugene Shoemaker with pioneering the field of planetary science. Shoemaker, a geologist, combined his knowledge with astronomy to explore the surfaces of moons, planets, and comets during the space race. He trained the astronauts headed to the Moon, and even sat next to Walter Cronkite on air as NASA’s spokesperson on the status of the moon missions. He named many of the craters, valleys, and mountains on the Moon. His contributions proved so great that he even has a whole comet named after him.

In 1994, Comet Shoemaker—Levy 9 gained worldwide attention because it crashed into Jupiter. This impact eventually led to scientists realizing that Jupiter acted as an important “vacuum cleaner” for debris that could otherwise pose a threat to the Earth.

Shoemaker spent much of his later life trekking across the globe to find impact craters that had gone unnoticed. Tragically, one of these trips ended in a fatal car crash. Eventually, they sealed Shoemaker’s ashes in a metal cylinder and sent it to the Moon. His wife, Carolyn, who had made many discoveries alongside her husband had an image of the Hale-Bopp comet inscribed on the outside, along with a quote from Romeo and Juliet:

And, when he shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

Shoemaker remains the only person ever buried on an extraterrestrial surface. Though many companies have drawn inspiration from science fiction shows like Star Trek to offer space burials, they typically launch these capsules into low Earth orbit. These ashes end up falling into the atmosphere soon after and burn up. Elysium Space, however, wants to send people’s ashes all the way to the Moon, so that they’ll stay in space. The price is about ten thousand dollars, which is the same as the average cost of a regular funeral in the US.