So you were thinking ashes to moon dust?

The recent flight of SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded craft to reach space, has renewed interest in TransOrbital Inc., a San Diego County company planning to launch its Trailblazer lunar orbiter in March.

“TransOrbital wants to be the FedEx or UPS of long-haul truckers for deep space, but right now our focus is the moon -- we’d like to be known as the delivery service to the moon,” says TransOrbital President Dennis Laurie, whose everyday conversation has a futuristic spin.

“We’ll launch Trailblazer off a Russian rocket that used to be an ICBM that was pointed at the U.S. You’ll be able to communicate with the satellite while it’s in orbit. You’ll get a confirmation by sending an e-mail and receive an automatic response from the orbiter. That’s never been done from the moon.”

For its second and third missions, TransOrbital has sold space in time capsules that will preserve business cards, messages, photos, jewelry -- even cremated remains -- on the moon, Laurie says.

“If you want a safe place to keep information, free from man-made or natural disasters, the moon makes an excellent location for storage of information, a library or archive, sales or technical data or lineage records. Some people in Europe designed a cosmetics container that’s shaped like a rocket ship. They’ll actually be able to say their product is on the moon.”

The time capsule containing personal artifacts also will launch a variety of artistic visions -- seven painters are sending compositions each slightly larger than a business card.

Not to be outdone, several musicians have secured room for their recordings. “Musicians want their CDs on the moon,” Laurie says -- but listeners will have to visit the orb to hear them.