LAKE OSWEGO, OR — A former NASA worker wants to blast his beloved cat into outer space — the feline’s remains, anyway. Steve Munt, who wrote software for the Hubble Space Telescope, is raising money to hitch Pikachu’s ashes on a satellite into the heavens.
Pikachu, one of seven cats Munt has adopted since his retirement, was euthanized in mid-January after battling diabetes for about a year. Munt tried to save the cat, which had been hospitalized twice, before he tearfully said goodbye.
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“Pikachu will have a final send-off like no cat has ever had before,” Munt wrote on the crowdfunding site GoFundMe, where he has set a goal of raising the $5,000 Celestis Memorial Spaceflights needs for the launch into the universe. The Houston-based company typically sends the remains of humans — astronauts, actors, professional athletes and the like — into space, but Pikachu has reached celebrity status in his own right.
“A portion of his remains, from his heart, will be launched into orbit, where he will watch over the Earth, and we can track his location as he showers the world with love,” Munt wrote on the crowdfunding site.
After retiring from NASA, Munt launched a second career, one that doesn’t have a salary but makes him purr with the satisfaction: He began helping cats that looked to have lived their proverbial nine lives.
Along with Pikachu, one of them was was a cat named Zee.
She was just a young thing when veterinarians told Munt that Zee should be euthanized due to a chronic kidney problem. The vet gave Zee a 5 percent chance of survival, but Munt refused to give up, and sought out experimental stem therapy and acupuncture treatments.
“I was all-in,” Munt told the Lake Oswego Review. ” I wanted to give her every chance.”
That was in 2014. Now, Zee is thriving — and about 12,000 fans are following her journey on Twitter.
“She’s considered by many to be a miracle cat,” Munt told CNN. “I decided to start a Twitter account for Zee. Zee became a character. I personified Zee. Zee is actually a quantum physicist.”
The account is nothing short of delightful. It details not only Zee’s fictional struggles with the Oxford comma and anti-gravity experiments, but also normal everyday cat antics of companions like Garfield, adopted from the Oregon Humane Society earlier this month, and Mowgli.
When Munt posted on Twitter that Pikachu had died, “there was just an incredible outpouring of support on Twitter. I have literally thousands of condolences,” he told CNN.
If he raises enough money — about $1,200 had been raised on GoFundMe by midday Thursday — Pikachu would be the first cat to get a space funeral.
“Pikachu was the best,” Munt wrote on GoFundMe. “We will always look up to him, and he will remain in our hearts forever. Together, we can all make him proud.”
Tearing up, Munt told CNN he doesn’t “see this as something frivolous.”
“You know, to me, it’s a very deeply affecting experience,” he said.
GoFundMe is a Patch promotional partner.