We are floating through space. In a huge spacecraft called earth. Aren't we?
The boring and saner approach is just to do traditional funerary options and use the money left over to help fund space research.
I think it's understood that this won't be cheap. But what about this "safety issue"? We're talking about a dead body. Yes, there's a chance the rocket will explode, but that would be a pretty cool "burial" as well.
> The boring and saner approach is just to do traditional funerary options and use the money left over to help fund space research.
So, you're proposing that instead of spending a hundred million dollars on a space burial, I spend a few grand on a regular burial and donate the rest to "space research". That's still insane but now you killed the incentive.
In all seriousness, cryochambers in space are vital space research, so why not start out with dead bodies of rich humans?
We launch people's whole dead bodies into space in specially crafted capsules. First we flash freeze the body here on Earth. Then we put it in the capsule and launch it towards a star that we think has earth-like exoplanets.
The capsule itself has a small nuclear power supply, a cryogenic system, a few astronomy instruments and a little bit of AI. The idea would be that in the cold of space, the cryo-system would need almost no energy to keep the body frozen, and otherwise it would be like a mini-Voyager with some AI in it. As it travels, it would send back science data, and use the AI to make minor adjustments to its orbit as it got closer to that other solar system in millions of years, to attempt to put itself into orbit around an Earth-like exoplanet.
Why do this?
1. The customer gets to have their body float through space for millennia. Cool!
2. Humanity gets the benefit of all the science data that would come back from all these mini-Voyagers going in all different directions.
3. In the incredibly off-chance that any of this works as intended, your body ends up in orbit around an exoplanet.
4. There is a very very very tiny chance that you end up in orbit around a civilization that has the ability to retrieve your body and reanimate it.