Boulder City fixture’s final wishes fulfilled with ashes launched into space

Kawana Paipai Whatarangi Ropoama Pohe toured among the stars during his band’s heyday in the 1960s, playing saxophone while opening for groups like the Beatles with the Māori Hi-Five. 

When he moved to Boulder City in the 1970s, he operated the Hoover Dam’s gift store for decades, organized a world record-setting line of pennies to celebrate the dam’s 50th anniversary, and opened Flying Saucer, an alien-themed store and attraction.

And he did it all while blind.

Pohe, who died in 2021 at age 84, will have another opportunity this weekend to be among the stars when some of his ashes are launched into space as part of a memorial spaceflight.

In 2006, he started the process of getting his ashes sent into space. Kara Larsen, his daughter, helped put the final touches on the recent memorial.

“He toured the world, and he loved Las Vegas because he loved the action,” Larsen said, adding later that she thought the flight was something where “he could go out with a bang to make his mark.”

Pohe was incredibly proud of his Māori heritage, the Indigenous people of what today is New Zealand. He didn’t want to be called “grandpa,” Larsen explained, so he went by “koro dude” — “koro” being the Māori way of addressing an older man.

His tagline for his memorial page on the flight’s website reads: “We know you were out of this world koro dude.”

But it was Larsen’s job to tell the rest of the family what Pohe had planned during a trip she took to New Zealand. 

The most common response she got was: “You can do that?” And with Celestis Memorial Spaceflights, which started transporting ashes into space in the 1990s, you can.

Celestis CEO Charles Chafer told the Sun that the company typically had the ashes of over 150 people on each flight, which then gets attached to another payload from a rocket or satellite company. 

Pohe’s ashes will be on the Perseverance, launched by a Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX but in a pod from space startup the Exploration Company. The Perseverance is set to orbit Earth two or three times at 17,000 mph before landing in the Pacific Ocean for retrieval, according to Celestis’ website.

The cost of a Celestis flight varies based on its destination. The “Earth Rise Service” Pohe used starts around $3,500 while staying in orbit runs an additional $1,500. Getting into lunar orbit, landing on the moon or sending ashes to deep space costs around $13,000.

But Chafer explained that the company did much more than move ashes from point A to point B, taking care of the dayslong ceremony before takeoff.

The company provides families with “expert briefings” from the people operating the rocket, conducts a memorial service and provides a private viewing area to watch the launch, the CEO said.

“Now, we can’t eliminate grief … but you see that emotional release generally at liftoff,” Chafer said. “In many cases, the family has given the loved one something that they wanted their whole life but just couldn’t do. (It’s) a very cathartic experience.”

Unsurprisingly, Pohe’s interest in space — specifically aliens, even writing a “layman’s guide to the extraterrestrial,” Larsen mentioned — won’t be unique aboard the flight taking off from Southern California.

“A lot of the (stories) were either (about how) they worked with NASA or they just had a love of it or just felt otherworldly in a way,” Larsen said of watching previous memorials. “It’s neat how the people all tend to kind of come together with common interests.”

It’s also a bonding experience for those relatives, Chafer said. After completing a two- to three-day experience, even a group of 700 guests arrive as strangers and leave as one big family, he said.

Larsen said she wouldn’t be able to physically attend the memorial or launch but that she’d been given a livestream to watch both.

The work “makes our whole team, including me, feel great that we’ve been able to fulfill somebody’s dreams or we’ve been able to provide a family with a little bit of joy amidst a time of great loss and mourning,” Chafer said. “It’s a business, but it’s also a labor of love for all of us.”

Larsen said her father wanted 21 grams of his ashes split evenly between orbiting the Earth, traveling through deep space and sitting on the moon. Pohe’s ashes were also aboard the Aurora and Excelsior flights and are scheduled to launch again in 2026. 

“He had a very specific plan,” Larsen said. “He’s like, ‘I don’t want (my grandchildren) to have to go to a grave. They can just look up in the sky and know that I’m there.’  ”