“Exceptionally absorbing and thrilling. ... Masterful.” —
Nature
A "magnificent" (
Scientific American
), genre-defying narrative
of the most ambitious science project ever conceived: NASA’s deep space mission
to Europa, the Jovian moon where might swim the first known alien life in our
solar system
In the
spirit of Tom Wolfe and John McPhee,
The Mission
is an exuberant master
class of creative nonfiction that reveals how a motley, determined few expanded
the horizon of human achievement.
When scientists discovered the
first ocean beyond Earth, they had two big questions: “Is it habitable?” and
“How do we get there?” To answer the first, they had to solve the second, and
so began a vivacious team’s twenty-year odyssey to mount a mission to Europa,
the ocean moon of Jupiter.
Standing in their way: NASA,
fanatically consumed with landing robots on Mars; the White House, which never
saw a science budget it couldn’t cut; Congress, fixated on going to the moon or
Mars—anywhere, really, to give astronauts something to do; rivals in academia,
who wanted instead to go to Saturn; and even Jupiter itself, which guards
Europa in a pulsing, rippling radi­ation belt—a halo of death whose conditions
are like those that follow a detonated thermonuclear bomb.
is the Homeric, never-before-told story of modern space
exploration, and a magnificent portrait of the inner lives of scientists who study
the solar system’s mysterious outer planets. David W. Brown chronicles the
remarkable saga of how Europa was won, and what it takes to get things
done—both down here, and up there.