Cover Story

“And I’m floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today …”

It was July 1969 and while I sang along to David Bowie’s newly released “Space Oddity”on breakfast radio, my grandmother, born in Wales at the tail end of the 19th century, was pouring her modest retirement savings into the purchase of an “extravagantly expensive” (according to my mother) color television, determined to watch the first humans walk on the moon in full Technicolor. Even more vividly than I can remember seeing Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong take those first tentative steps on the dusty lunar surface, I remember my grandmother’s palpable excitement and sense of wonder at what was to her, born before the Wright Brothers’ inaugural flight, an almost inconceivable achievement.

I also remember the music. “Space Oddity” was initially banned in the United States, and also by the BBC in the United Kingdom, in case its haunting tale of “Major Tom,” a doomed astronaut cut adrift in space, should prove too much of a downer at what was intended to be a time of jubilant celebration. However, fortunately for nascent Bowie fans like me, the BBC TV team responsible for handling the U.K.’s Apollo coverage apparently never got the memo, blithely broadcasting his song to the nation as the background music to the landing.

In this issue, we celebrate how the cosmos has inspired human creativity among artists of all genres — from musicians and writers to painters, designers and filmmakers. We listen in on a conversation between two theoretical cosmologists discussing their research into some of the greatest mysteries of the universe. We learn about our dean’s first major experiments as an astrophysicist in Chile’s Atacama Desert. We meet two alumni who co-lead a laboratory at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena where they search for the origins of life on Earth to better understand where life might begin elsewhere in the universe. We look at the possibility of extraterrestrial life and how we might best communicate with aliens. Our experts debate the ethical and political implications of attempting to own the cosmos and its resources.

Since our ancestors first walked the Earth, we have experienced awe and wonder as we look up at the magnificent splendor of the night sky. In this issue, we also take you on a journey back in time to explore what the ancients figured out about the universe.

We hope you enjoy the immersive and painterly qualities of our cover image — a photograph released last year by NASA to celebrate the Hubble Space Telescope’s 30th birthday. The giant red nebula and its smaller blue neighbor are part of a vast star-forming region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, located 163,000 light-years away. The image is nicknamed the “Cosmic Reef,” for its resemblance to a coral reef floating in a vast sea of stars. Some of those stars are monsters, each 10 to 20 times more massive than our sun, while the seemingly isolated blue nebula was created by a solitary mammoth star 200,000 times brighter than our sun.

And if that doesn’t inspire awe and wonder, I don’t know what will! —S.B.