If I remember my Navajo mystery novels correctly, this is specifically because the Navajo/Dinee consider corpses to be ritually unclean. I guess the equivalent would be taking powdered human waste up to the moon and flinging it around just to say there's human DNA on the moon (I'm sure all the moon missions left their waste behind anyway, there's already human DNA up there).

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Riding on Peregrine are a wide variety of scientific instruments developed by NASA that will pave the way for future lunar exploration as part of the agency's Artemis program.

But also tucked away on the mission's manifest are sets of human DNA and remains, which are going up on memorial spaceflights offered by two different companies, Celestis and Elysium Space.

In response, the President of the Navajo Nation, Buu Nygren, has filed a formal objection with NASA and the U.S. Department of Transportation over what he calls an act of desecration.

"It is crucial to emphasize that the moon holds a sacred position in many Indigenous cultures, including ours," Nygren wrote in a letter dated Dec. 21.

The U.S. government has formed an interagency group to review the Navajo Nation's objections and request for delay, agency representatives added during the briefing.

No individual religion can or should dictate whether a space mission should be approved," Celestis CEO and co-founder Charles Chafer said in an emailed statement to Space.com.

The original article contains 807 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!