NASA's Plan to Park Humans at the Edge of Space

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]NASA is designing a mission to deliberately fly astronauts to the one place in the solar system that no human has ever physically [music] been, the exact boundary where the sun's protection ends and interstellar space begins. It's called Persephone, and here's what makes it insane. The sun shoots out a constant stream [music] of charged particles called solar wind.

[00:00:19]This wind travels outward at 400 miles per second, creating an invisible bubble around our entire solar system.

[00:00:26]But eventually, it slams into the wall of interstellar space, the material between stars. That collision zone is called the termination shock, and it's where the real data lives. Every single robotic probe we've sent there just flew [music] through it at escape velocity, collecting snapshots as they zoomed past. But Persephone [music] would do something no mission has ever attempted, actually stop there.

[00:00:49]Astronauts would park a crewed spacecraft in the termination shock and stay for 3 [music] years, becoming the first humans to exist outside the sun's protective bubble. The catch, >> [music] >> they'd experience cosmic radiation levels 400% higher than astronauts on the International Space Station. The data they could gather by actually living there instead of flying through, that's information [music] that could revolutionize our understanding of where our solar system ends and the galaxy truly begins.