THE NEW HORIZONS SPACE PROBE carried 30 grams of Clyde Tombaugh's ashes to commemorate Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto in 1930. The package is no different in its information content than 30 grams of cigarette ashes, since Tombaugh's unique genetic information was burnt up and never loaded on board. A proper celebration of Tombaugh's historic contribution could have taken the form of an electronic record of his DNA. The Principal Investigator of the mission, Alan Stern, told me that sending a stem cell with Tombaugh's genetic making would have triggered a bureaucratic nightmare at NASA. The challenge is even bigger for launching a complete human being in the form of an astronaut to a journey in space that lasts more than a few years.

There was a time where astronauts on the International Space Station were all alone. But with the advent of Artificial Intelligence, now they feel less lonely. Crew Interactive MObileCompanioN (CIMON) is an AI Astronaut Assistant that is developed by German space agency DLR, Airbus, and IBM. The project lead for this first free-flying AI astronaut, Matthias Biniok, was approached for this big project in 2016. Their main aim, was to build a robot and send it into space for providing assistance.