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The Dutch teachers will be at the launch, along with some of the 800 American student scientists.

Wende Doohan, widow of “Scotty,” will launch the rocket and astronaut Cooper's widow, Suzan, will be on hand with her daughters to see her husband become the first U.S.

astronaut to return to space in the afterlife.

"Obviously, I'll be revisiting some old emotions, but this will be nowhere as emotional as it was watching him go into space when he was alive," she says.

If all goes according to plan, the 15-minute flight will see the single-stage rocket that resembles a giant dart climb 70 miles into space, where it will drift about in weightlessness for about five minutes.

The rocket will then separate from its booster and both will float back to earth beneath parachutes, landing 33 miles from the launch site.

Sending his wife into space as a posthumous celebration of her life on earth was an easy decision for Archbold, who paid $1,400 to Celestis, a company that pioneered memorial space flights in the 1990s.

She had been a Star Trek fan since the first series on television and dragged her husband to many Trekkie conventions, where the...

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