Peregrine Mission One

by Lisa Kelly

for Gene Roddenberry, aka the Great Bird of the Galaxy, 18 January 2024

Peregrine was supposed to boldly go
where no man’s ashes have gone before.
The remains of Star Trek creator,
Gene Roddenberry, were part of the payload –
for the first-ever planned lunar landing
by a private company, a precursor perhaps
to a regular public transport stop in space.
Sadly, his ashes failed to mix with moondust
after the lander sprung a propellant leak,
and its controllers, back at the depot,
deliberately crashed it into the earth’s atmosphere.
Gene’s incinerated bone fragments
burnt up once more in the doomed spacecraft,
joining yet more space junk orbiting earth.
Navajo Nation will not mourn this failure,
protesting that landing human remains
on the moon is desecration of a sacred space,
and Gene, after writing so many Star Trek scripts,
surely should have predicted any attempted takeover
of territory by an alien species rarely goes well –
but like the rest of us who hope for a bus,
not to get a puncture, the engine to start,
the train to arrive on time, our ambitions
to boldly go anywhere by private or public
transport are often thwarted and turn to ashes.