Since she was 5 years old, Karen Sucharski's daughter Genevieve had dreamed of space travel. Genevieve was fascinated with the spiral galaxies her grandfather showed her from the Black Forest Observatory. At 7, she looked up until her neck was sore after discovering the Milky Way Galaxy on a South Dakota camping trip.

She and her mother headed east to the plains with Genevieve's telescope whenever there was a meteor shower. Genevieve had even cried her eyes out at Galileo's tomb in Italy.

But Genevieve's dreams of space travel ended eight years ago when she was killed in a car crash while returning to Colorado Springs from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, where she was double majoring in medicine and astronomy.

Aug. 2 would have been Genevieve's 27th birthday, and Sucharski, as well as her husband, Mark, sat at a laptop computer for more than three hours watching a live webcast of the launch of a SpaceX rocket carrying a portion of their daughter's ashes, along with the ashes of 207 others, from a site in the Marshall Islands. For the Sucharskis, the launch was supposed to be the posthumous fulfillment of their daughter's lifelong dream. The Falcon 1 rocket left the launch pad flawlessly, but complications as the payload gained altitude prevented it from reaching orbit. The rocket exploded and none of the ashes were recovered.

"I said to Mark, ‘I don't know if I can do it again,'" Sucharski said. "Emotionally, it's really hard. I'm sure I'll want to do it again, but my initial reaction was, ‘Oh my God, no.'"

Saturday's launch was the third attempt to send Genevieve's remains into space through Celestis Inc., a subdivision of the Houstonbased company Space Services, which aims to help families honor the memory of loved ones through postcremation memorial spaceflights.

Genevieve's ashes were first launched on Sept. 21, 2001, from Vandenburg Air Force Base in California, but the rocket lacked enough thrust to leave Earth's gravitational pull and crashed back into the Indian Ocean. Those ashes were never recovered.

Last year, the company offered Sucharski a chance to send some more of her daughter's ashes on a shorter "Legacy Flight" launched from Spaceport America in Las Cruces, N.M., for free. On the Legacy flights, ashes enter space for a few minutes before re-entering Earth's atmosphere. Sucharski agreed and has the recovered dented capsule containing a few ounces of her daughter's remains.

Saturday's flight would have sent her ashes into space for months to years in the appropriately titled "Explorers Flight," which included the ashes of Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, a Russian cosmonaut and actor James Doohan from "Star Trek."

Space funerals aren't cheap, and Sucharski said their family was lucky to afford even one trip into space; it actually costs millions of dollars per pound of ash by Sucharski's reckoning. The original cost of $5,000 to send just a bit of Genevieve into space was cut in half after Sucharski and her husband agreed to be a "media family" for Celestis, giving interviews and promoting the early efforts of the company in becoming a forerunner in the race to privatize space. Sucharski said it was hard talking with strangers about her daughter's death; she was glad she did it during the first year, when she was in shock.

"The second year, the shock wears off and you're just miserable," she said.