'Trek' actor's ashes will be blasted into space

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) -- Beam me up, indeed!
James Doohan, who played chief engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott in the original "Star Trek" TV series and several movies, will have a few grams of his ashes blasted 70 miles into space this fall from southern New Mexico.
Houston-based Space Services Inc. plans to have the ashes of 100 others aboard the Oct. 21 "memorial spaceflight" -- among them, Gordon Cooper, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts.
Doohan died last July at age 85. His widow, Wende Doohan, said he would have wanted such a send-off.
"If the privatization of space was available when he was alive, he would have been first in line with a window-seat ticket," she told The Associated Press in a phone interview Tuesday.
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