Voyager 3

Voyager 3 is a decades-old spacecraft traveling beyond the solar system whose weakening signal reaches Sully aboard Aether. As she listens for signs of contact from Earth, the probe’s transmissions connect her to an earlier generation of space exploration—and its indefinite drift gives shape to her own questions about wandering and how a journey might end.

Identity and Interstellar Journey

Launched more than thirty years earlier by another generation of astronauts, Voyager 3 is the third human-made object to travel beyond the solar system and into interstellar space. It follows a path through the theoretical Oort cloud, a region described as containing in-utero comets and icy crystals, and will eventually enter another solar system.

Its future destination is not a chosen one. At some point, the gravitational pull of a celestial body—a planet, a sun, or a black hole—will draw it in. Until then, it will continue drifting from solar system to solar system through the Milky Way, with no fixed destination and no planned arrival.

A Fading Signal

Sully sometimes tracks information streams from probes belonging to other projects. Voyager 3 is the one she returns to: its signal is already terribly faint, but when she tunes her receiver to 2296.48 MHz, she can sometimes catch a little information, like words gasped by a dying man. The transmissions make the spacecraft’s distance and failing power palpable; what reaches her is only an occasional remnant of a message.

The probe also recalls the silence of its predecessor, Voyager 1. Sully remembers being a little girl at the kitchen table in Pasadena, eating raisin bran before school, when her mother read the news that Voyager 1 had finally gone silent after its power supply was exhausted. The headline called it Humanity’s First Envoy to Interstellar Space Says So Long. Voyager 3 is following that earlier craft’s path, while its faint signal gives Sully a present-tense encounter with the same prospect of eventual silence.

Meaning for Sully

Voyager 3 is special to Sully because it recalls the moment she began to understand how vast the universe was. Even as a child, she felt called by the emptiness beyond familiar destinations. Now, far from Earth herself, she recognizes a likeness between the probe’s unending drift and her own life as a wanderer.

That likeness is unsettling as well as magical. Sully tries to imagine what it would mean to have no destination, only to keep drifting forever. Remembering how her journey began distracts her from the uneasy question of how it might end. The probe does not answer that question; its significance lies in making both the wonder of going outward and the uncertainty of having no return or arrival impossible for her to ignore.