It takes a few calls to figure out just what it means to orbit the earth. We know John Glenn orbited the earth, and that before him a Russian orbited the earth, and sometime before him some poor monkey was sent up to circle the globe. But not all of us know what is really up among the stars right now, nor what it took to get it up there.

As it happens, there’s between 2,000 and 3,000 items circling the earth, everything from leftover rocket parts to satellites, to the Mir space station, though these are just the pieces big enough to catch on radar. “From the size of a baseball to, maybe, half of a small Honda,” says the nice man at NASA whose job it is to answer such questions.

Call the Virginia-based Orbital Propulsion Corporation and yet another helpful spokesman will explain that you can’t just aim a rocket into the air and hope nature will pull it into orbit. “There’s science involved,” he says, adding that you need to launch an orbiting device in an eastward direction at a specific angle to make it work right, somewhere around 151 degrees. He added that most satellites are about 500 miles above the equator, move from east to west, and circle the earth at about 18,000 miles an hour — really, really fast, even by Montana standards.

All of this may seem like space trivia, but recent developments have cast them into more, well, human terms.

Example. Having worked the night shift the previous evening, Ursula Boutilier was sound asleep in Greene, Maine, on the Monday morning when her husband’s cremated remains were launched into orbit. Over in Exeter, Elaine Ewing awoke in time to watch the launch on TV, but had only a short clip on CNN to acquaint herself with the fact that her husband, too, finally had made it into space.

By now, most people know that on April 21 an L-1011 jet flying 22,000 feet over the Canary Islands launched a Pegasus rocket carrying Spain’s first satellite and the ashes of Timothy Leary, Gene Roddenberry and 20 others into space. Most people also know it was the first such burial-in-space of its kind. What most people don’t know is that the remains of two Maine residents were among those on board.

“He was a completely unique individual,” says Boutilier of her husband, John, a sometime advertising professional, inventor, and harness racing promoter who died of complications from heart surgery last August at 65. “He was an information junkie, and he … [was] fascinated with technology and the advances made in exploring space. He had me tape the Hubble telescope launch and the Mars exploration.”

“It was one of his passions,” Ewing says of her husband, Joseph Ewing Jr., an Exeter home and commercial building contractor who left a wife and three children when he died of complications from heart surgery last year at 53. “It was one of those things where if he could do things over again, he would have liked to have gone and been an astronaut.”

If the Celestis corporation’s “Founders Flight” was something of a public spectacle, carrying portions of the cremated remains of celebrities and a dozen or so space-age pioneers, the decision to take part made by the widows of Joseph Ewing Jr. and John Boutilier had more to do with their husbands’ secret dreams than a career in the aerospace industry or an obsession with the unknown.

Boutilier died before word of the Houston-based Celestis corporation’s first-ever such service (available for a $4,800 fee) became widely known. But his wife had good reason to believe he would have wanted to take part. Several years ago, after realizing his valiant recovery from a heart transplant operation was starting to fail, he thought of writing NASA with an unusual offer. Being “one of the true clean-slate thinkers I’ve ever met,” as his wife says, he drafted a letter offering “to volunteer to man a one-way space mission, to send back information and just travel off into the universe.”

“I voted against that,” says his wife, who added that he never sent the letter. “I’m pretty sure NASA wasn’t going to accept him anyway.”

“He had mentioned … that he wanted his ashes taken to all the places that he didn’t get to go to when he was alive,” Boutilier says. “The possibility of taking him into space at that time was unheard of. So when I heard about this, and knowing about that letter that he almost sent to NASA, it seemed like … he was the perfect candidate.”

Ewing says her husband brought up the idea of having his ashes sent into space, ironically enough, after reading an article that mistakenly gave the impression the service was available long before it actually was.

“He had read an article where somebody in the NASA program had taken ashes into outer space … I [later] called NASA and they said that they’d never done it …

“But … [he] used to say that’s what he wanted, to be sent in outer space.”

Ewing and Boutilier finally will get to meet each other at 1 p.m. on Sunday when the Celestis corporation holds a memorial service in Lompoc, Calif., for the families of the Founders Flight participants.

Despite having been part of the democratizing of the space age, the artifact that ties them all together is small, strangely enough. While the average cremation produces 7 pounds of granulated bone fragments (ash is the wrong word, it bears more of a resemblance to small seashells), only 3 1/2 ounces of each participant’s remains are attached to the basketball-size object currently making 90-minute passes above the equator. As a small, third stage to the rocket, the segment separated from the satellite sometime after leaving the atmosphere, leaving it to float freely overhead in a trajectory that is likely one day, around six years from now, to head towards home and burn up while re-entering the atmosphere.

“When I read in one of the newspapers that he’ll be passing overhead every 90 minutes, that was a nice feeling,” says Boutilier.

“He didn’t get to go to lots of places he wanted to go to, so I and children and friends and friends of friends have taken portions of his ashes to an incredible number of places. Golf courses he wanted to play and didn’t get to play. Major league ball games of every description … he’s been to the Amazon rain forest, he’s been to Switzerland, he’s in England right now, as a matter of fact … . Friends have gotten into this whole thing, and now every time someone is going away, they show up and say OK, now give me some of John to take with me … . It’s a poignant way to keep him a part of our lives.”

Like Boutilier, Ewing has taken portions of her husband’s ashes to different places.

“We still have some [ashes] here at home with us. And some of them I put in a headstone in Massachusetts where I’ll be buried. One of my daughters is 21, and she’s been talking about having a necklace made with some ashes in it. We saw on a news program where people are doing that more and more.”

“In the last five or six years, people have done a lot of innovative things with cremated remains,” says Jack Springer of the Chicago-based Cremation Association of North America. He says one of the advantages to cremation is that it allows such delayed gatherings as the California memorial. Cremations have been on the rise in the United States, he says, especially in the mountain states where people have a more back-to-nature approach to issues. In Maine, 35 percent of the dead are cremated. If current trends continue, by 2010, that figure could top 60 percent.

That could mean many more creative memorials, something in which the people at Celestis, whose next launch is scheduled for August, certainly hope to participate.

“Some people are excited about it, and some people you feel kind of funny saying something to them about it,” says Ewing of the reaction she’s been getting to her husband’s small place in the stars. “He was a loving, supportive individual. He enjoyed living … and he would set goals and he would always attain them. And that was one of the goals that he was unfortunately unable to attain because of, you know, his path in life … It’s a nice feeling to know that, as a person, he wasn’t able to do it here on earth, but now he’s had an opprtunity to experience [it] symbolically.”

“People felt comfortable with him,” says Ursula Boutilier of her husband. “He fit in everywhere, and that’s sort of what we’re doing. We’re making him fit in everywhere.”