On Earth, Grover Baines (a NASA scientist) is murdered in 1979 when he stumbles upon a secret third Voyager flight. Unlike the two other probes, Voyager 3 was a small manned craft loaded with reproductive material in hopes of finding a suitable planet for habitation on Alpha Centauri. The scientist's family continues to unravel clues about what happened, and whether there's any truth to the papers they discover. Years later, in 2001, a fourth Voyager is sent on the same mission. Though technology has advanced dramatically in the 24 years since the first three Voyagers were launched, this mission manages to remain secret amid the attacks on the Twin Towers. When contact is lost with Voyager 4, plans are put into motion for a 5th Voyager to retrieve its lost siblings. As NASA struggles to reconcile the past, the crews on each ship wrestle with the boredom of space and limitations of the technology available to them, and the Baines family attempts to find peace with the past.