The Searchers
September 26, 2024 at 05:40PMIf you read Odyssey Magazine as a child, if you dreamed of going to Space Camp—hell, if you thrilled to the livestream of the rover Curiosity landing on Mars in 2012—then Dave Eggers’ visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will brighten your day like few other things. Life on other planets has never seemed so close.
If the men at the Microdevices Lab were a bit insular, Siegler, the chief technologist for NASA’s exoplanet program, is their precise opposite. He is loud and gregarious and funny, and he wanted to show me a technology that, like the moon telescope killed by Nancy Grace Roman, might not make it to space but would be damned phenomenal if it did. I present it to you in the hope that we can together create some kind of write-in campaign so this thing happens. It will be the most beautiful space object ever made by humans, involving gold foil and pulleys and origami, and will be bigger than a football field. It must happen. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/09/26/the-searchers-3/
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