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In THE MISSION, acclaimed journalist David W. Brown gives a rollicking, genre-bending tale that tells how one of America’s boldest and potentially most revolutionary space missions came to be. Yet it almost didn’t happen, and by focusing on the key men and women involved, Brown reveals the amazing combination of passion, persistence, imagination, science, engineering, and political savvy that it takes to get a major space project off the ground.



Most Americans have probably never heard of Europa, one of the small moons circling Jupiter. Thanks to data sent back by the Galileo satellite in the 1990s, we know that it has a large saltwater ocean bubbling with thermal activity underneath a miles-thick layer of ice. Since these are very much like the conditions that scientists believe led to the appearance of life on Earth, researchers have been yearning to undertake a closer investigation of Europa and Jupiter’s three other icy moons.



But as Brown vividly details in his distinctive and engaging voice, ramping up for a major space program is a project of decades, requiring mind-boggling amounts of preparation across many different fields, not to mention many billions of dollars, which Congress, the president, and ultimately the public must be persuaded to spend. “In the end,” Brown writes, “it would take seventeen years, six major studies, multiple missions approved, multiple missions abandoned, friendships formed and enmities established, funding raised and budgets lost, congressional hearings, unlikely alliances, technological breakthroughs, terrible losses, and stunning discoveries to get NASA to make it official.