Imagine covering the distance from New York to Tokyo in just over a minute while plunging into a 2,500-degree Fahrenheit environment. This episode tells the story of NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, the fastest human-made object ever built and the first spacecraft to enter the atmosphere of a star. We trace the mission back to a 1958 proposal, the abandoned plan to use a Jupiter slingshot and nuclear power, the cancellation in the early 2000s, and the redesign around seven Venus flybys that brought the cost to about 1.5 billion dollars and made the 2018 launch possible.

We explain why Eugene Parker’s 1958 solar wind theory was initially rejected and how the probe came to be the first NASA spacecraft named for a living person. Then we get into the engineering: the carbon-carbon heat shield with a 97 percent empty foam core, solar limb sensors and reaction wheels that autonomously keep instruments in shadow, retractable solar arrays with pumped cooling, niobium antennas and a tungsten and sapphire Faraday cup that glow red hot while taking 246 measurements per second. We cover the April 2021 crossing of the Alfven critical surface, magnetic switchbacks and the coronal heating problem, space weather, comet discoveries, and the mission’s eventual fiery end.

• Why shedding Earth’s 67,000 mph orbital velocity requires gravitational braking rather than rocket fuel
• The December 2024 record of 690,000 kilometers per hour, about 0.064 percent of light speed
• How a 160-pound, four-and-a-half-inch shield keeps instruments at 85 degrees Fahrenheit
• What switchbacks reveal about a corona 150 times hotter than the Sun’s surface
• How hydrazine depletion will end the mission and why the heat shield will outlast everything else