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Voyager 2 joined Voyager 1 outside the heliosphere one year ago. Now, five new papers reveal what it has found out there.


Only two of humanity’s spacecraft have left the Solar System: NASA’s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Voyager 1 left the heliosphere behind in 2012, while Voyager 2 did the same on Nov. 5th, 2018. Now Voyager 2 has been in interstellar space for one year, and five new papers are presenting the scientific results from that one year.

The heliosphere is a bubble-shaped region of space with our Sun in the center. Think of it as an inflated cavity full of plasma that comes from the Sun. The edge of the bubble is where the plasma from our Sun gives way to the interstellar medium (ISM.) Voyager 2 left the heliosphere behind and entered interstellar space at about 18 billion km (11 billion miles) from Earth.

**Space Renaissance International (SRI) Medici Fund** is happy to announce that, due to the generosity of our Education Sponsors, we are able to award a few **prizes and grants for students** of any age, interested to space settlement, exploration and civilian development. Three programmes are now open to applicants, in the frame of the **2021 Space Renaissance Congress “The Civilian Space Development”**.

The 3° SRI World Congress (SRIC3) will take place in a virtual format and will provide attendees with cutting-edge developments in Space Settlement & Exploration, Human Rights, Ethics, Policies, Engineering, Entrepreneurship, Energy, Economics and Education from leaders in their respective fields. Experts in research and industry will present the emerging technologies and future directions in their field. Students at all ages, who are interested in Space Science, Technology, Philosophy, Economy, Policy, Law, Art, are warmly encouraged to participate to the 2021 Space Renaissance Congress. Please visit this link to apply to any of the Student Sponsored Programmes: https://2021.spacerenaissance.space/index.php/students-sponsored-programs/

Sunday’s flight likely pushed the helicopter to its farthest distance yet: around 330 feet. Ingenuity has another two flights ahead.


The helicopter made spaceflight history last Monday when it lifted off Mars and rose 10 feet above the planet’s surface. Never before had a spacecraft conducted a controlled, powered flight on another planet.

Then on Thursday, Ingenuity flew even higher — 16 feet — and moved sideways for the first time.

Sunday’s flight was Ingenuity’s most daring excursion to date.

This brave new world seeks to meld space and cyber-space. For both Immortalists and Transhumanists, the human personality lies in the brain, which can live eternally if “uploaded” onto a computer, a favoured theme of science fiction writers. The company Neuralink aims to provide brain-machine interfaces which merge human consciousness and artificial intelligence – helping humans “stay relevant” in a world dominated by AI.


On 28 December 1903, during a particularly harsh Russian winter, a pauper died of pneumonia on a trunk he had rented in a room full of destitute strangers. Nikolai Fyodorov died in obscurity, and he remains almost unknown in the West, yet in life he was celebrated by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and by a devoted group of disciples – one of whom is credited with winning the Space Race for the Soviet Union.

Now, just as he prophesied, Fyodorov is living a strange afterlife. He has become an icon for transhumanists worldwide and a spiritual guide for interplanetary exploration.

Fyodorov’s poverty came by religious choice rather than material necessity. He was the illegitimate child of Prince Pavel Gagarin, and spent his early childhood on the family’s country estate, until the sudden death of both his father and grandfather, Prince Ivan Gagarin. While Fyodorov’s family had no connection to the first cosmonaut, Anastasia Gacheva of the Fyodorov Museum-Library in Moscow says there is “an important symbolic coincidence – between the Gagarin who foresaw spaceflight in a philosophical way, and Yuri Gagarin who became the world’s first cosmonaut”.