08. National Geographic USA - August 2017

SELF-STYLED FA S T E S T S H A R K S ARCHAEOLOGY
MESSIAHS IN THE SEA BY S AT E L L I T E
THE
SPACE
I S S UE
THE NEXT
M O O N S H OT
| I N O R B I T W I T H S C OT T K E L LY
| V OYA G E R , 4 0 Y E A R S L AT E R
| B E S T EC L I P S E I N A C E N T U RY
AUGUST 2017
“ ELEGANT”
- Owen D., Brooklyn, NY
A L L- N E W M A Z DA C X- 5
Alluring upon first glance. A connection at
first touch. The all-new Mazda CX-5 is the
result of over 250 refinements that appeal to
the senses. From a quieter cabin to available
heated second-row seats, the CX-5 shows our
passion for driving. Because Driving Matters.
DR I VI NG MAT T E R S
®
2017 Mazda CX-5 Grand Touring shown.

I CO N T E N T S
A U G U S T 2017 • VO L . 232 • N O . 2 • O F F I C I A L J O U R N A L O F T H E N AT I O N A L G EO G R A P H I C S O C I E T Y
THE SPACE ISSUE
EXPLORE
Stardust, star names, a solar probe, and more
30 S H O OT F OR THE
MO O N . AGA IN .
Can money be made by going into space?
By Sam Howe Verhovek
Photographs by Vincent Fournier
62 | A MOON MUSEUM
$VSULYDWHƃUPVWU\WRODXQFKDPRRQ
LQGXVWU\DUWLIDFWVRIWKHƃUVWODQGLQJV
may be threatened. By Brad Scriber
66 | SPACE ODYSSEY
What does space smell like? Astronaut Scott
Kelly reveals that and more in this excerpt
from his upcoming memoir, Endurance.
FEATURES
76 | WARRIORS TO THE RESCUE

Kenyans shelter orphaned elephants.
82 | MESSIAH COMPLEX
Self-described saviors draw disciples.
94 | A PLACE TO GO
Outdoor defecation threatens health.
120 | BOLT FROM THE BLUE

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On the Cover This composite image is of

the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant in the
Milky Way galaxy, as viewed by the Herschel
Space Observatory and the Hubble Space
Telescope. Photo by NASA, ESA
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Go to natgeo.com/corrections.
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A SHARKFEST FOR VIEWERS, READERS

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powerful ocean predators in Shark, a new book available
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the wonders of Nepal, and uncover secrets for seeing
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HEAR HISSING? THEY MAKE HOUSE CALLS.

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retrieve venomous snakes that encroach on Durban,
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TELEVISION, BOOKS
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anniversary of the death of
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Own Words on August 14 at
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| F R O M T H E E D I T O R | S A N I TAT I O N
TA L K I N G TO I L E T S Susan Goldberg: So let’s have a con-

versation about poop.
W I T H M AT T DA M O N Matt Damon: Great. With the group’s
name being Water.org, if we ever solve
the access-to-clean-water side of water
He’s a famous, award-winning actor, producer, and and sanitation, I wonder if the name
screenwriter. But Matt Damon, 46, also is co-founder
would become [deleted].org…
RI:DWHURUJDQRQSURƃWWKDWSURPRWHVDFFHVVWRVDIH
ZDWHUDQGVDQLWDWLRQ,LQWHUYLHZHGKLPLQ:DVKLQJWRQ'&
DVKHSUHSDUHGWRDGGUHVVOHDGHUVDWWKH:RUOG%DQN SG: I can’t print that! That’s pretty funny
though.
Seriously: In trying to report and
photograph the story on sanitation that
is in this issue [see page 94], it became
clear that this is a hard thing to talk
about for a lot of people.
MD: Yes. If you talk about something
like cancer or AIDS, even if you’re talking
about the developing world, people in
the developed world totally relate. We all
have people who’ve battled one of those
diseases, and it’s instantly relatable. But
something like this just isn’t.
Maybe we’ll have stories of grand-
parents or great-grandparents who were
going to the outhouse, but this is a prob-
lem that largely has been solved in the
developed world. We can’t really relate to
something like open defecation, which
is a huge issue in the developing world.
SG: That’s even hard for some people to

say aloud. One of the things we really try
to do in our story is to show the impact
of the lack of sanitation; maybe then you
can get people to rally around.
MD: It’s hard to get people to compre-
hend the enormity of the problem—that
2.4 billion people lack adequate access
to sanitation. More people have a cell
phone than a toilet. You lose a kid under
the age of five every 90 seconds because
of lack of access to clean water and sani-
tation. Those two really go hand in hand.
SG: So what do you do?

MD: The first hurdle to clear is to get
people to understand that it’s an issue,
and then the second is to try to make it
easier to talk about. We can use humor.
We had an idea of shooting a PSA [public
service announcement] at some fabu-
lous Hollywood celebrity’s house and I’d
PHOTO: PARI DUKOVIC

THIS INTERVIEW WAS EDITED FOR LENGTH AND CLARITY.
ask to use the bathroom and they’d go, SG: It’s interesting you should mention :ULWHU(OL]DEHWK5R\WHDQG
Oh, no, we don’t have bathrooms—we young people. One of the places we went SKRWRJUDSKHU$QGUHD%UXFH
document sanitation prob-
practice open defecation. to report our story was Vietnam, and the OHPVLQWKHGHYHORSLQJZRUOG
SG: Were there any celebrities you had problem is turning around because the LQWKHVWRU\Ţ$3ODFHWR*Rţ
in mind? kids are going to school and there are RQSDJHRIWKLVLVVXH
MD: I thought it would be funny if it toilets in the school. And they’re going
Visit Water.org to learn more
were at Jimmy Kimmel’s house. [Editor’s home to their parents and saying, “This DERXWWKHRUJDQL]DWLRQŠV
note: That line got a laugh because for is what we should do.” HƂRUWVWRLQFUHDVHDFFHVV
nearly a decade Damon and talk show MD: Yes, right, that’s exactly right. to safe water and sanitation
LQWKHGHYHORSLQJZRUOG
host Kimmel have pulled pranks on each
other and pretended to be feuding.] SG: One of the things I wonder about is
this: The United Nations has said that
SG: So the world is full of important by 2030 it is a goal that there not be ‘2.4
BILLION
causes, lots of things that you can spend open defecation. Do you think there’s
PEOPLE LACK
your time and energy and money on. any way we could come close to that?
Why this mission? MD: Definitely by 2030. ADEQUATE
MD: I started to look at issues of extreme SG: That’s only 13 years.
ACCESS TO
poverty and wanted to get involved; MD: I know. But it’s happening rapidly.
water and sanitation just undergirded SANITATION.
everything. It was just so massive, and SG: You mentioned that in doing this MORE PEOPLE
I didn’t hear anybody talking about it. work, you hear moving stories. What
It’s just endlessly fascinating and vast- kind of stories are people telling you? HAVE A CELL
ly complex, and there’s no kind of one MD: Well, there was a 13-year-old girl, PHONE THAN
silver bullet that’s going to fix it. and my oldest was 13 at the time, so I
really related to this kid. It was in A TOILET.’
SG: So where are you starting? Haiti, and we’d helped bring water M AT T DA M O N
MD: I partnered with [engineer and to this village that hadn’t had it. And
social entrepreneur] Gary White, and this 13-year-old was no longer going to
we co-founded Water.org. It’s basically have to scavenge for water three to four
using the concepts of microfinance and hours every day.
tilting it towards water and sanitation: I said, “What are you going to do
We’re providing loans for people to con- with all this extra time? Are you going
nect to a water utility or build a latrine to have more time for homework?” And
for their house. We’ve now reached she looked at me and she goes, “I don’t
5.5 million people, and we’re going to hit need more time for homework. I’m the
2.5 million [more] just this year. smartest kid in my class.” I knew she was
telling the truth, so I was just like, “All
SG: One of the things that our writer ran right, hot shot, well what’re you going to
into in reporting the story was that there do with this extra time?” And she looked
were so many cultural inhibitions—for at me and she said, “I’m gonna play.”
example, that in parts of the world peo- It just buckled me because kids
ple liked going outside. They thought it shouldn’t be burdened with these things.
was cleaner to go away from your house, Those kids should be playing. That’s
to go off into a field. what our kids think about, and it’s what
MD: Yeah, if you don’t have pipes to these kids should be thinking about.
carry the waste away, then that’s true. ***
And so if you go to India, for instance, Thank you for reading National
you’ll find these giant fields where the Geographic.
entire community is practicing open
defecation. But that is changing, and
it’s changing really rapidly, I think, in
large part because of the young people. Susan Goldberg, Editor in Chief
I VISIONS
United States
As summer temperatures soar,
96 fountains at the base of the
Unisphere help visitors beat the
heat in this long-exposure shot.
The stainless steel globe in New
York City’s Flushing Meadows
Corona Park—140 feet tall, 120
feet in diameter, 350 tons—is a
lasting reminder of the 1964-65
World’s Fair. Its rings symbolize
WKUHHHDUO\RUELWDOƄLJKWVKHUDOG-
ing the dawn of the space age.
PHOTO: MATTHEW PILLSBURY,
BENRUBI GALLERY
O Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com.

| V I S I O N S | YO U R S H O T. N G M .C O M
A S S I G N M E N T: Juan Carlos Osorio

Montclair, New Jersey
S PAC E Osorio’s daughter, Sophia, used to wear princess dresses.
But one day she decided to dress as an astronaut instead.
We asked the Your Shot community to inter- She donned her costume at Oheka Castle on Long Island,
pret the notion of “space.” The images we DQG2VRULRKDGKHUKROGWKHVHUHƄHFWLYHEDOORRQVŢ,ZDQWHG
received spanned the cosmic to the terrestrial. to have a picture of her happy childhood,” he says.
R OA D TO YO U R
THE E D W I T H
I S PAV
HAPPY PLACE D FLAKES.
RAISINS AN MENT.
AND PAVE
®, TM, © 2016 Kellogg NA Co.
E X P LO R E
S PA C E
A R R AY O F L I G H T Research in Perth as well as other insti-

tutions in Australia and New Zealand—
have stitched together more than 40,000
By Catherine Zuckerman
images taken by the telescope.
The result is a groundbreaking por-
Even on the starriest of nights, the trait of the entire southern sky. It exposes
human eye sees just a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of galaxies mil-
cosmos. So if the curve of the Big Dipper lions of light-years away. And it shows
or the four points of the Southern Cross in unobscured, blazing color the radio
appear magnificent, consider how many glow of the Milky Way, lit up with the
more phenomena must exist out of view. remains of exploded stars and intense
That prospect is what led astrono- magnetic fields. This sweeping survey,
mer Natasha Hurley-Walker to a radio says Hurley-Walker, “allows people to
telescope deep in the outback of West- see the sky with radio eyes.”
ern Australia. The telescope, called the Her research is far from finished.
Murchison Widefield Array, is made Hurley-Walker is now working with an
up of thousands of antennas that see international team to develop a radio
through celestial dust and detect “radio telescope many times bigger and more
light”—revealing colors and objects in sensitive than the Murchison Widefield
a spectrum not visible to humans, even Array. Its technology could pick up faint-
with the aid of optical telescopes like er signals, which would unveil millions
Hubble. Stretched across nearly four more galaxies and—if her wish comes
square miles of desert, the antennas— true—“the birth of the very first stars.”
cheaper to produce and maintain than
typical dishes—look like “an army of In this composite image, the Milky Way
mechanical spiders,” she says. and radio galaxy Centaurus A glow in
In the past four years, Hurley-Walker the southern night sky above a section of
WKH0XUFKLVRQ:LGHƃHOG$UUD\WHOHVFRSH
and a team of researchers—from the In- Below, the center of the Milky Way is
ternational Centre for Radio Astronomy VKRZQDWYDULRXVZDYHOHQJWKV
GAMMA RAY X-RAY VISIBLE

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AND LANDSCAPE BY JOHN GOLDSMITH, CELESTIAL
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FAR-INFRARED MICROWAVE
| E X P LO R E | S PA C E
W H E R E S TA R D U S T through Earth’s atmosphere, first melt-

ing and then solidifying. The examples
HIDES ON EARTH shown here—from Larsen’s new book,
In Search of Stardust—exhibit swirling
By A. R. Williams
ridges, golden spots of iron-nickel metal
and sulfide, and crystal pyramids of min-
A Norwegian jazz musician and citizen erals, which formed during the journey.
scientist, Jon Larsen has figured out how Larsen was able to find micromete-
to do something the experts thought orites by washing the sludge that had
was impossible—find specks of cosmic accumulated in open roof gutters, sifting
dust, called micrometeorites, amid the it, and then using a magnet to extract
detritus of human habitation. Scien- particles from the remaining grit. After
tists look for these particles, which rain approaching many scientists, he finally
down constantly on Earth, in Antarctica persuaded Matthew Genge, a planetary
and other pristine locations, but Larsen scientist at Imperial College London, to HOW SMALL?
thought there should be a way to collect examine 48 particles he had collected. Each particle is about
them in more populated places. Genge analyzed their composition and 300 microns wide,
roughly the width of a
Some micrometeorites are real confirmed that Larsen had indeed man- human hair. To capture
stardust—flecks from exploded stars. aged to find extraterrestrial dust amid tiny details, Larsen and
Others are likely created when aster- earthly debris. “Jon was the one staring colleague Jan Kihle
oids collide and comets vaporize. Larsen down the microscope,” says Genge, “go- shoot with varied focal
lengths, taking one photo
learned to identify the unique features ing through hundreds of thousands of per micron. Software
that take shape as the specks plummet particles to find just one micrometeorite.” combines the images.
STACKED MICROSCOPE PHOTOS: JAN BRALY KIHLE AND JON LARSEN

N I N E T EE N T H -HOL E M E M OR A BLY.
STREAMSONG, FL
SIP DEL IC IO USLY.
FROM THE HOME OF
WE MAKE OUR BOURBON CAREFULLY. PLEASE ENJOY IT THAT WAY.

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N A M E T H AT S TA R
By Catherine Zuckerman
They may sound like characters from

the pages of Harry Potter, but Alfirk
and Grumium are actually the names
of two stars in the universe. Along with
225 other unusual-sounding monikers,
they’re part of a new registry of official
star names. The list was created by the
International Astronomical Union, the
group that authorizes the naming of
celestial objects.
For millennia humans have relied on
the stars to navigate seas and cultivate
crops, says astronomer Eric Mamajek.
Over time a single star could rack up
dozens of names with various spellings
and translations, many rooted in ancient
Greek and Arabic. Astronomers assign
alphanumeric designations to heavenly
bodies, says Mamajek, but people like to
use names for places: “You don’t refer to
your hometown by its zip code.”
Mamajek hopes the new list will pro-
vide all stargazers a streamlined lexicon.
Meanwhile, he and his team maintain an
internal index of every name they find—
at last count, about 3,500 for 950 stars.
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WELL SUITED
F O R S PAC E W O R K
By Jeremy Berlin
On Earth, clothes make the man—and

woman. In space, they’re the key to sur-
vival. Whether helping astronauts enter
Earth orbit, walk on the moon, pilot a
space shuttle, or travel to Mars, space
suits must serve several vital functions:
provide oxygen, control temperature,
permit movement, power communica-
tions, and protect against solar radiation.
But fashion is fickle, and technology
grows apace. Space historian Roger
Launius says the first suits were based
on what jet pilots wore. Over time
they’ve evolved into autonomous mod-
ules that help astronauts negotiate the
inky expanse, gather samples, and work
on the International Space Station.
Yet in some ways they’ve hardly
changed. Now as then, a space suit is
essentially a gas-filled, human-shaped
covering. (Exceptions include the
form-fitting suits Dava Newman is de-
veloping at MIT and the high-mobility
models Pablo de León is designing at
the University of North Dakota.)
Launius says a hard-shell suit is opti-
mal but impractical. “So you’ve always
had suits that can be pressurized, unpres-
surized, and folded up. The downside is
that, when inflated, they look like the
Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.”
The next step: a suit that’s easy to
get into and out of. “We also need one
for both zero gravity and a surface with
some gravity, like Mars,” says Launius.
He concedes that those goals may be
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mutually exclusive. But why not shoot KLVWRULFPRRQZDON7KH= DERYH LVWKHQHZHVWSURWRW\SHZLWKDEXEEOH
for the moon? KHOPHWKDUGXSSHUWRUVRUHDUHQWU\KDWFKDQGTron-LQVSLUHGVW\OLQJ
A SUIT FOR ALL MISSIONS

Mercury/Gemini Apollo EMU Z-1, Z-2
7KHƃUVWVSDFHVXLWV Custom-tailored for a 7KH([WUDYHKLFXODU0RELO- 7KHVHSURWRW\SHVDUH
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Q\ORQFRYHUHGWKHH[WHULRU ZLWKDOLIHVXSSRUWV\VWHP RUELWDQGEXLOGWKH,66 UDEOHWKDQSUHYLRXVVXLWV
3+2726'$1:,17(56ǖ/()7Ǘ%,//67$))25'$1'52%(570$5.2:,7=1$6$
C A R L SAG A N photos were grainy and inconclusive and GO FURTHER

showed only one percent of the planet. Read Carl Sagan’s “Mars:
I M AG I N E S M A R S In 1967 Sagan wrote a feature story for A New World to Explore”
in the December 1967 issue
National Geographic that explored the
By Natasha Daly of National Geographic by
question that had occupied his thoughts visiting archive.national
as a child: Is there life on Mars? The piece geographic.com.
Carl Sagan spent his childhood im- included a rendering of a theoretical
mersed in Mars. The future scientist, Martian, to which he gave serious atten-
an avid reader of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s tion. In correspondence with his editors,
science fiction, would pass evenings ly- Sagan expressed dismay at an early draft
ing in vacant lots, looking up at the sky of the art, saying the Martian resembled
and “thinking myself to that twinkling “a man dressed up in a turtle suit.” He
red place.” He fantasized about Martians, envisioned “a benign Martian vegetar-
their bodies a kaleidoscope of color— ian” with no eyes. “Let’s have him find
Burroughs’s Mars had two more prima- his way in the daytime by his little red
ry colors than Earth—with removable tendrils and at night he will dig a hole.” ‘ L E T ’ S H AV E
heads but decidedly human forms. “I The final painting (above) satisfied [ THE MARTIAN]
didn’t realize then the chauvinism of Sagan, his years of study evident in the F I N D H I S WAY
making people on another planet like us.” details: The creature’s spindly limbs suit I N T H E DAY T I M E
But in 1965 the first flyby mission to Mars’s low gravity; its glass-like shield
BY HIS LITTLE
Mars returned photos of pristine rock— blocks ultraviolet radiation. The art was
and nothing else. It was a gut punch. The a paean to the Martian imaginings of RED TENDRILS
New York Times declared Mars a dead Sagan’s youth. In 1996, shortly before A N D AT N I G H T
planet. “The fanciful Martian mega- his death, Sagan recorded a message HE WILL DIG
fauna,” John Updike wrote many years to future Mars explorers: “Whatever the A HOLE.’
later for this magazine, “were swept into reason you’re on Mars is, I’m glad you’re CARL SAGAN IN A LETTER
oblivion.” Sagan was undeterred: The there. And I wish I was with you.” TO H I S E D I TO R , 1 9 6 7
PAINTING: DOUGLAS S. CHAFFEE

leave your family
a better world
Family comes first when planning your legacy, which is why
many people decide to leave a gift to the National Geographic
Society in their will or trust. It’s a wonderful way to change
your family’s world for generations to come.
C R E AT E A L E G A C Y O F YO U R O W N
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Copyright © 2017 National Geographic Society Michael Nichols/National Geographic Creative

By Timothy Ferris
I
nsofar as we esteem the creations tha
last—Homer’s Odyssey, the bridge stil
standing, enduring love—let us now
praise the twin Voyager space probes
launched 40 years ago and currently
departing the solar system to drift for
ever among the stars.
Each about the size and weight of a
subcompact automobile, the Voyager
epitomize 1970s high tech. Their com
puters are weaker than those in today’
digital watches, their analog TV camera
more primitive than the ones that sho
Laverne & Shirley. But they made history
at every planet they reconnoitered—
confirming, as Voyager chief scientis
Ed Stone put it, that “nature is much
more inventive than our imaginations.
Jupiter, which looks serene through a
telescope, was shown by Voyager to have
hundreds of raging hurricanes, a glow
ing aurora at the north pole, and three
thin rings. Saturn’s rings, previously
countable on the fingers of one hand
FA N TA S T I C V OYA G E
turned out to include thousands of ring
lets and seemingly braided component
that theorists had assumed were im
possible. (“We thought we knew it all,
D E E P I N S P A C E , T W O I N T R E P I D T R AV E L E R S T U R N 4 0 said astronomer Brad Smith. “Ha!”
Active volcanoes, formerly found only
on Earth, turned up in abundance on
Jupiter’s satellite Io and, astoundingly
on Neptune’s Triton, where nitrogen
geysers were observed erupting at 40
degrees above absolute zero on the
Kelvin scale. Two of the solar system’
most promising environments for find
ing alien life—Jupiter’s icy moon Europa
and Saturn’s Enceladus—were unveiled
by the Voyager mission. Their cores pal
pitated and heated by tidal interactions
Europa and Enceladus appear to sustain
vast, briny oceans beneath the ice, where
living organisms might thrive.
A big-science endeavor that con
sumed some 10,000 work-years, the
mission has been described as “one o
the greatest voyages of exploration eve
Launched in August and September 1977, NASA’s twin Voyager
spacecraft have opened up new worlds for exploration, including conducted by our species.”
Saturn (top) and Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune (above, left to right). Yet it almost didn’t happen.
CURRENT DISTANCE VOYAGER 1
FROM THE SUN 12.9 Jupiter Launch: September 5, 1977
Billions of miles March 5, 1979 VOYAGER 2
July 9, 1979 Launch: August 20, 1977
Sun August 2012

Voyager 1 leaves Neptune
The prospect of a “grand tour” of the heliosphere, enters August 25, 1989
outer planets emerged in 1965 from the interstellar space
at musings of an aeronautics graduate stu-

ll dent named Gary Flandro, then work- 10.6
w ing part-time at NASA’s Jet Propulsion

s, Laboratory in Southern California, the
y world’s preeminent center for interplan-
r- etary exploration. At age six, Flandro Uranus
January 24, 1986
had been given Wonders of the Heavens,
a a book that showed the planets lined up
s like stepping-stones. “I thought about T H E G R A N D TO U R
Saturn
Voyagers 1 and 2 were launched
m- how neat it would be to go all the way November 12, 1980
40 years ago on a mission to ex-
ex
s through the solar system and pass each August 25, 1981
plore the outer solar system. After
as one of those outer planets,” he recalled. encountering Saturn, Voyager 1 Mercury, Venus, and
angled upward. Voyager 2 went Mars omitted for clarity
ot Assigned at JPL to envision possible
on to visit Uranus and Neptune
y missions beyond Mars, Flandro plotted before angling downward.
— the future positions of Jupiter, Saturn,
st Uranus, and Neptune with paper and
h pencil. He found that they would align
.” in such a way that a spacecraft could Congress didn’t really understand the and marks the designated boundary
a tap the planets’ orbital momentum to situation, and quietly went to work de- between the solar system and in-
e slingshot from one to the next, gaining signing and building two tough, smart terstellar space, are expected to fall
w- enough velocity to visit all four planets spacecraft capable of going all the way silent around 2030, when the Voyagers’
e within 10 or 12 years rather than the to Neptune. Any “life limiting” flaws in plutonium-powered electrical genera-
y decades such a venture would require the probes’ design were weeded out. The tors finally falter.
d, otherwise. The mission launch window sun sensors in their navigation systems Thereafter the Voyagers will func-
g- would open for a matter of months in were boosted so they could function out tion more as time capsules than space-
ts the late 1970s, then close for another where the sun gets dim. Fuel-saving ships. With that eventuality in mind,
m- 175 years. techniques were developed to keep the JPL attached to each probe a copy of
,” It was an ambitious idea at a time mission viable long after it was supposed the “golden record” that contains mu-
”) when the apex of interplanetary explo- to end. “We just did it and didn’t talk sic, photographs, and sounds of Earth
y ration was Mariner 4 shooting 21 grainy about it,” recalled William Pickering, for the benefit of any extraterrestrials
n photos as it flew past Mars. No probe had JPL’s director at the time. who might intercept it someday. The
y, ever functioned for anything close to a The ruse worked. Once Voyager had records should remain playable for at
n decade in space. None had the intelli- proved to be both a scientific cornuco- least a billion years before succumbing
0 gence to manage complex planetary pia and a globally popular emissary to to erosion from micrometeorites and
e encounters at vast distances without the great beyond, Congress funded the the high-velocity subatomic particles
’s constant human hand-holding. Playing extended mission that JPL had surrep- called cosmic rays.
d- crack-the-whip past multiple planets titiously been managing all along. That’s a long time. A billion years ago,
a might work in theory but had never been The Voyagers paved the way for the the most complex forms of life on Earth
d attempted in practice. “I was told, ‘This Jupiter orbiter Galileo and the Saturn or- were the tidewater mats of cyanobacte-
l- is impossible; stop wasting my time,’” biter Cassini that followed, which spent ria called stromatolites. A billion years
s, Flandro recalled. years gathering photos and data before from now, the brightening sun shall
n NASA swallowed hard and proposed a being ordered to incinerate themselves have begun boiling off Earth’s oceans.
e grand tour mission anyway, but Congress in the planets’ upper atmospheres to Yet the Voyagers will still be out there
rejected it, instead approving a cheaper, ensure that they’d never impact and somewhere, emissaries of a species that
n- stripped-down version that would ven- contaminate a possibly life-harboring dispatched them without hope of return.
e ture out no farther than Saturn. moon. Now the Voyagers as well are
of The JPL spacefarers responded in A Voyager spacecraft undergoes testing at JPL in No No- nearing the end of their scientific life. Timothy Ferris, the producer of Voyager’s
er the tradition of the hardiest explorers of vember 1976, nine months before its launch. Originally Their weakening radio signals, currently
EXLOWWRODVWƃYH\HDUVDQGH[SORUH-XSLWHU6DWXUQDQG golden record, wrote on dark matter in the
earlier epochs. They cheerfully agreed their moons, the Voyagers are now far beyond Pluto reporting on the surprisingly complex January 2015 issue. Story produced in part-
to the plan, assured one another that DQGVWLOOVHQGLQJVFLHQWLƃFLQIRUPDWLRQEDFNWR(DUWK plasma bubble that surrounds the sun nership with HHMI Tangled Bank Studios.
3+272-2+1*5(*2,5(1$6$-3/$//27+(5,0$*(61$6$-3/
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EC L I P S E D BY WA R perfectly situated for refueling planes

between Hawaii and Australia. In Au-
By Nina Strochlic gust, Britain sent two officials to set up
a base and asked the United States to
“The weather is absolutely perfect,” remove its marker. Instead, President
announced an NBC broadcaster from Franklin Roosevelt claimed the island
an uninhabited Pacific atoll on June 8, and dispatched three Hawaiian “colo-
1937. Minutes later the moon blocked nists” to live there.
the sun—beginning what reports called As World War II loomed, Japan viewed
the longest total eclipse in 1,238 years. Britain’s tolerance of the encroachment
Isolated Canton Island was the best “as evidence of Anglo-American co-
place to observe the eclipse’s seven- operation,” according to media reports. To see the total eclipse of
minute arc across the sky, and a National Sure enough, the U.S. and U.K. did agree 1937, an American expedi-
tion set up camp on barren
Geographic–U.S. Navy expedition had to control the island jointly and to pre- Canton Island. The team’s
hauled 22,000 pounds of equipment from vent the Japanese from using it. The U.S. presence, alongside a rival
Washington, D.C., to Honolulu and then military built an airstrip and installed viewing party, provoked a
WXJRIZDUIRUWKH3DFLƃF
1,900 miles into the Pacific Ocean to be over a thousand men. Though the Jap-
island, which the Christian
there. The 13-person team of scientists and anese occasionally staged submarine Science Monitor described
photographers marked their mission’s and bomber attacks, Canton survived as ideal “for somebody who
success with a large concrete monument the war largely unscathed. doesn’t care about shade
or drinking water, and who
embedded with two American flags. The U.S. finally left the island in 1976. likes solitude.”
Nearby, a scientific expedition sponsored Three years later Canton joined the
by Britain displayed the Union Jack. Republic of Kiribati and was renamed
The friendly rivalry soon became a Kanton. A few years ago only two dozen
diplomatic issue. Canton had no shade people remained. Soon the island might
or permanent drinking water, but it was return to its uninhabited state.
3+27265,&+$5'+67(:$57ǖ723Ǘ).5,&+70<(5ǖ$%29(Ǘ
1$7,21$/*(2*5$3+,&&5($7,9(ǖ%27+Ǘ
DISCOVER MORE WITH NAT GEO PLUS
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Copyright © 2016 National Geographic Partners, LLC. All rights reserved.

If you purchased RUST-OLEUM
2X spray paint Products, a class
action Settlement may affect
your rights.
A proposed class action Settlement has been reached concerning
Rust-Oleum marketing practices regarding certain Products.
The case, White v. Rust-Oleum Corp., Case No. 16AC-CC00533,
is pending in Cole County Circuit Court, Missouri.
What is this about?
The lawsuit claims that certain Rust-Oleum 2X spray paint
Products were improperly labeled as providing twice the
coverage of competing brands. As part of the Settlement,
Defendant Rust-Oleum Corp. has agreed to stop this marketing
practice and provide payments for customers. Rust-Oleum
denies any wrongdoing.
Who is a Settlement Class Member?
You may be an eligible Settlement Class Member if you
purchased (in the U.S., for personal use and not for resale)
between December 12, 2011 and May 30, 2017, any Rust-Oleum
2X spray paint Products, including: Painter’s Touch Ultra
Cover 2X spray paint, Painter’s Touch 2X Ultra Cover spray
paint, PaintPlus Ultra Cover 2X spray paint, American Accents
Ultra Cover 2X spray paint, and American Accents 2X Ultra
Cover spray paint. A complete list of Products is found on the
website below.
:KDWDUHWKH%HQH¿WV"
Settlement Class Members without Proof of Purchase may elect
a Benefit of $1.00 per Unit purchased, up to $3.00 per Household
for Tier 1 Claims; or $1.50 per Unit, up to $6.00 per Household
for Tier 2 Claims, if willing to provide additional information.
Proof of Purchase is required to obtain a refund of more than
$6.00 per Household. Payments may be less depending on
a number of factors. There is also injunctive relief. Visit the
website for details.
What are my rights?
You have the right to file a Claim, Opt-Out, Object, or do
nothing. To receive a payment, you must submit a Claim online
or by mail. Your Claim must be submitted online or postmarked
by October 16, 2017. Or, you may Opt-Out. You will not receive
a payment, but you will keep your right to pursue a separate
lawsuit against the Defendant about these claims. Your request
to Opt-Out must be postmarked by August 28, 2017. Finally,
you may object to the Settlement. You must submit an Objection
in writing. Complete information and instructions are available
on the Settlement Website. Your Objection must be received
by August 28, 2017. If you do nothing, you will receive no
payment and have no right to sue later for the claims released by
the Settlement.
The Court will hold a Fairness Hearing in the Circuit Court
of Cole County, Missouri, 301 E High Street, Jefferson
City, MO 65101, in the courtroom of the Honorable Jon E.
Beetem, Division One, on September 12, 2017, at 9:00 a.m.,
to decide whether to approve the Settlement and to award
attorneys’ fees and expenses of $1,740,000, and up to $5,000
as a Class Representative Service Award to each of two Class
Representatives. The Fee and Expense Award and the Class
Representative Service Award are to be paid by the Defendant
and do not reduce the recovery by the class in any way. All briefs
and materials filed in support of the Settlement and the Fee
and Expense Award will be made available on the Settlement
Website. You may attend this hearing, but you do not have to.
Payment will be made to the Settlement Class only if the Court
approves the Settlement and all appeals are resolved. Please be
patient. If the Settlement does not become effective, the Action
will continue. You still have the right to make a Claim or file
an Objection now and Opt-Out from the Action later if the
Settlement does not become effective.
For more information, please visit
www.SprayPaintSettlement.com, or contact the
Settlement Administrator at 1-855-486-7348 or by
writing to Spray Paint Settlement, c/o Heffler Claims
Group, P.O. Box 58788, Philadelphia, PA 19102-8788,
or contact Class Counsel at Steelman, Gaunt &
Horsefield, 901 Pine Street, Suite 110, Rolla, MO 65401.
1-855-486-7348
ǁǁǁ͘^ƉƌĂǇWĂŝŶƚ^ĞƩůĞŵĞŶƚ͘ĐŽŵ
M I S S ION I NTO TH E
H E AT O F T H E S U N
By Rachel Hartigan Shea
NASA has embarked on many successful

missions—from rocketing astronauts to
the moon to launching the first space-
craft to reach interstellar space. But it
hasn’t yet sent a mission to the sun. The
deterrent? Our nearest star’s searing heat.
The surface of the sun is 10,000°F, but
its outer atmosphere—the corona—soars H
RT
EA
to some 3.5 million degrees Fahrenheit. NUS
“This temperature inversion is a big mys- VE
E R C U RY
tery that no one has been able to explain,” M
says Nicola Fox, project scientist for the Launch

Parker Solar Probe, the NASA mission July 31, SUN
2018
that aims to finally get close to the sun.
PARKER SOLAR PROBE
The mission is made possible now by a
shield constructed from a carbon-carbon Solar-probe cup )LUVW9HQXVƄ\E\ First closest
composite, which will keep the probe’s Measures speed, density, and Sept. 28, 2018 approach
temperature of solar wind. Dec. 19, 2024
instruments safe in the 70-degree range.
Launching as early as July 31, 2018, the
probe will make 24 orbits of the sun. It Thermal shield
will get within four million miles of the Protects the probe from temperatures
star with the gravitational assist of seven Solar panels nearing 2500°F. The carbon-carbon
Generate power. composite shield is eight feet wide
Venus flybys. That’s close enough to find and just 4.5 inches thick.
answers to the sun’s other big mystery:
what creates the solar wind, the charged
particles that accelerate from the sun and :LGHƃHOGLPDJHU
wreak havoc on Earth’s electrical systems. Captures images of sun’s corona and solar wind.
“We see the sun every day, but we don’t Charged-particle detector
$QDO\]HVRULJLQVSHHGDQGPRYHPHQWRISDUWLFOHV
know much about it,” says Fox. “The sun Magnetometers
is the last major place for us to go.” 0HDVXUHPDJQHWLFƃHOGRIFRURQDIURPYDULRXVVSRWVRQERRP
PHOTO: NASA/SDO. GRAPHIC: DAISY CHUNG, NGM STAFF

SOURCE: JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY APPLIED PHYSICS LABORATORY
Scientists,
visionaries,
evangelists,
GUHDPHUV
Team Hakuto, Japan Sorato, the rover built by the Japanese team competing
for the Google Lunar XPrize, sits in a Tokyo clean room. A $20 million prize will go
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LEFT: FROM FULL MOON%<0,&+$(//,*+7ǩǱǱǱ25,*,1$/%<1$6$3+272%<0$5.7+,(66(11*067$)) 31
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WKLVLQWHUQDWLRQDOWHDP,26ŠVJRDOWREHWKHORZHVWFRVWODXQFKSURYLGHULQWKHSULYDWHVSDFHLQGXVWU\
Shoot for
the moon.
By Sam Howe Verhovek
Photographs by Vincent Fournier
Again.
The youthful Indian engineers took their
seats, a bit nervously, in a makeshift conference
room inside a cavernous former car-battery
warehouse in Bangalore. Arrayed in front of
them were several much older men and women,
many of them gray-haired luminaries of India’s
robust space program. The first Asian space
agency to send an orbiter to Mars, it also nearly
tripled a previous world record by launching
104 satellites into orbit in a single mission this
past February. The object of everyone’s attention
was a small rolling device barely the size of
a microwave oven.
TeamIndus, India :HLJKLQJLQDWMXVWXQGHUSRXQGVŞEXWFDUU\LQJWKHSULGHDQGKRSHVRIDQDWLRQ

RQLWVVSLQGO\IUDPHŞWKH,QGLDQWHDPŠVURYHUFRGHQDPHG(&$XQGHUJRHVWHVWLQJLQ%DQJDORUH
$ODUJHKHOLXPEDOORRQDWWDFKHGWRLWVLPXODWHVWKHPRRQŠVJUDYLW\ZKLFKLVRQHVL[WKWKDWRI(DUWK
34 N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C • AU G U S T 2 0 1 7
The members of the young crew explained traveling vehicle on the moon that can transmit
their plans to blast the device into space aboard high-quality imagery back to Earth.
a rocket late this year, position it into lunar or- The competition is modeled explicitly after
bit nearly a quarter million miles away, guide it the great innovation-spurring prize races of the
to a landing on the moon, and send it roaming early years of aviation, most notably the Orteig
across the harsh lunar landscape. The engineers Prize, which Charles Lindbergh won in 1927 when
of TeamIndus said their company would do all of he flew the Spirit of St. Louis nonstop from New
this on a shoestring budget, probably $65 million, York to Paris.
give or take, the vast majority of it raised from Like the quest for the Orteig Prize, the com-
private investors. petition for the Lunar XPrize involves national
A prominent Mumbai investor, Ashish Kacho- prestige. Teams from Israel, Japan, and the U.S.,
lia, who has put more than a million dollars into plus one multinational group, are vying for the
the firm, sat at the back of the room, transfixed honor along with India; a cavalcade of other na-
by the discussion. It somehow combined the tions participated on the 16 teams that survived
intense, rapid-fire questions of a doctoral the- into the semifinal stage last year.
sis defense with the freewheeling, everybody’s- Almost as diverse as their countries of origin
shouting, laughter-punctuated atmosphere of is the range of approaches and commercial part-
the Lok Sabha, India’s boisterous lower house nerships involved in solving the three basic prob-
of parliament. Kacholia hardly needed to be here lems at hand—launching from Earth, landing on
all day to check up on this particular investment the moon, and then going mobile to gather and
of his—far from his largest—but he stayed just transmit data. To meet the last challenge, three
to hear the erudite dialogue on selenocentric teams plan to deploy variants of a traditional rov-
(moon-centered) orbit projections, force model- er, while the other two intend to use their landing
ing, apogee and perigee, and the basis for how craft to make one giant leap for private enter-
“the kids” drew up the error covariance matrix. prise: They will “hop” the required minimum of
“It’s thrilling, really,” Kacholia explained. 500 meters on the moon rather than drive across
“You’ve got these 25-, 28-year-olds up there de- the lunar surface.
fending their calculations, all their work, in front As with many early aviation prizes, whichever
of a thousand years of the nation’s collective team prevails almost surely will spend much more
aerospace experience and wisdom.” His friend to win the prize than it gets back in prize money,
S. K. Jain, also a well-known Indian investor, though all the teams hope the global publicity
nodded in vigorous agreement. “These kids are and “brand enhancement” of victory will eventu-
firing up the whole imagination of India,” he ally make their investment pay off handsomely.
commented. “They’re saying to everyone, Noth-
ing is impossible. ” AT ITS CORE, this new sprint to space poses a
Nearly 50 years after the culmination of the question that would have been laughable in the
first major race to the moon, in which the Unit- Cold War era of the 1960s, when the U.S. was will-
ed States and the Soviet Union spent fantastic ing to spend more than 4 percent of its federal
amounts of public money in a bid to land the first budget to beat its superpower foe to the moon:
humans on the lunar surface, an intriguing new Can someone actually make money venturing
race to our nearest neighbor in space is unfold- out into the great beyond? To a demonstrably
ing—this one largely involving private capital wide range of entrepreneurs, scientists, vision-
and dramatically lower costs. The most immedi- aries, evangelists, dreamers, eccentrics, and pos-
ate reward, the $20 million Google Lunar XPrize sible crackpots involved in the burgeoning space
(or GLXP) will be awarded to one of five finalist industry, the answer is an enthusiastic yes.
teams from around the world. They’re the first President John F. Kennedy famously urged
ever privately funded teams to attempt landing a America in 1962 to “choose to go to the moon
in this decade and do the other things, not be- 7KLQND/XQDU;3UL]H PLOOLRQ
cause they are easy, but because they are hard.” IRUƃUVWSODFHDQGPLOOLRQIRUVHFRQG
Today Bob Richards, founder and CEO of Moon ZRXOGJLYHDQLFHERRVWWR\RXUEDQN
account? There are a few things
Express, the American team, offers a different, if \RXŠOOQHHGWRGR
consciously cheeky, rationale. “We choose to go
to the moon,” he says, “because it is profitable!”
Whether Richards is correct about that, and if
so, just when it might prove true, is wildly un-
Launch
EHIRUH'HFHPEHU
clear. Setbacks are the norm in the space busi-
/DQG
ness, and realistically, many companies will
make their early money mainly from govern-
ment contracts, not private customers. None-
DVSDFHFUDIWRQWKHPRRQŠVVXUIDFH
theless, Richards predicts that the world’s first
Travel
trillionaire will be a space entrepreneur, perhaps
one who mines the lunar soil for helium-3, a gas
that’s rare on Earth but plentiful on the moon
PHWHUVRQWKHPRRQ
and an excellent potential fuel source for nucle-
Talk
ar fusion—a holy grail of energy technology that
scientists have been trying to master for decades.
Or a huge fortune may be minted from the aster-
oids and other near-Earth objects, where robot- WR(DUWKXVLQJYLGHRDQGLPDJHV
ic technology could help mine vast amounts of
gold, silver, platinum, titanium, and other prized
elements bound up in them.
“There are $20 trillion checks up there, just
waiting to be cashed!” says Peter Diamandis, a
physician and engineer who is co-founder of
Planetary Resources, a company backed by Ava-
tar director James Cameron and several tech bil-
lionaires. Planetary Resources also acquired the
company Asterank in 2013. Asterank’s website
offers scientific data and projects the economic
value of mining more than 600,000 asteroids.
Diamandis is also founder and executive
chairman of the XPrize Foundation, which has
sponsored several other award competitions de-
signed to push the boundaries of invention and
technology in fields as diverse as artificial intel-
ligence, mathematics, energy, and global health.
The whole thrust of the Lunar XPrize competi-
tion, says Chanda Gonzales-Mowrer, a senior di-
rector at the foundation, is to help pave the way
to “a new era of affordable access to the moon
and beyond.”
Just as the worldwide acclaim for Lindbergh’s
bravura feat sparked huge interest in civil avi-
ation, the lunar competition is intended to fire
SHOOT FOR THE MO ON 37

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public imagination about private space pioneers, is dropping, and it is doing so dramatically,” ex-
who already are ferrying cargo to the Internation- plains John Thornton, the chief executive at As-
al Space Station and deploying satellites, orbital trobotic, a Pittsburgh-based firm whose aim is to
rocketry, and test modules. Soon the crafts may “make the moon accessible to the world” with lo-
be carrying passengers: Virgin Galactic, which gistical services that involve carrying everything
billionaire founder Richard Branson calls “the from experiments for universities to MoonMail
world’s first commercial spaceline,” says it’s gear- for customers who just want to leave a tiny some-
ing up to take passengers on brief space tours in thing on the lunar surface—a note, a photo, a
which they will experience weightlessness and lock of hair from a deceased loved one.
awe-inspiring views of Earth. SpaceX found- “A company like ours can do the math and
er Elon Musk announced in February that his show investors that we really do have a feasible
company would fly two as yet unnamed private plan to make money,” Thornton says. “Not many
citizens around the moon in late 2018 aboard its years ago, that would have been science fiction.”
Dragon spacecraft. Two months later Amazon If the race to put a man on the moon was the
founder Jeff Bezos said he’d be selling a billion equivalent of building one of those giant, room-
dollars in stock a year to fund Blue Origin, his size, prodigiously expensive mainframe comput-
own commercial and space tourism enterprise. ers in the early days of high technology, today’s
race is analogous to a different era of computing:
THERE ARE PLENTY OF REASONS to be skep- the race to put an affordable computer on every-
tical about how soon these firms will actually be one’s desktop or, a few years later, in everyone’s
carrying private customers to space; after all, a telephone. Today computers are so tiny—and
2014 crash of Virgin Galactic’s prototype passen- the batteries that power them so compact—that
ger spacecraft set that company’s effort back by we can reach the moon with increasingly small-
several years. And while the Lunar XPrize com- er and decreasingly expensive devices. Rather
petition appears to be coming to a head, there than golf cart–size rovers on the moon, the next
are plenty of obstacles to contend with: the pos- generation of machines exploring, mapping, and
sibility of a missed deadline, failure of prelaunch even mining the lunar landscape may well be the
rocket tests, to name just two. Plus, the impact size of a child’s Tonka truck. More than anything
of the race on the public imagination could well else, that’s the driving factor behind today’s
prove limited. For one thing it simply lacks the space economy.
human drama and suspense of the 1969 moon “Think micro-rovers and miniature CubeSats,”
landing and safe return of men to Earth, a feat says William L. “Red” Whittaker, legendary ro-
that began an era of human exploration on the boticist at Carnegie Mellon University and a pi-
lunar surface that wound up lasting a mere three oneer in both rover and self-driving automobile
years. Unmanned lunar rovers have been around technology. “It’s astonishing what’s going on.
for decades now: When China landed Yutu in Small is the next big thing. Very small.”
2013, it became the third nation to put a rover on The physics of human spaceflight remain
the moon. more complex—we are growing neither smaller
So, really, then: What’s the big deal? nor more compact, so it still takes plenty of fuel
“What’s new is that the cost of getting to space to get us up there—but these advances could
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herald a smaller, nimbler, cheaper way to get array of laptops, tablets, and sensors through a
people back on the moon and far beyond. wooded clearing and out onto the dunes. Then
In fact, some in the space industry say the came—literally with white-glove treatment—a
moon may one day be less the object of our jour- pair of roving robots designed to work mostly in
ney than a sort of giant Atlanta airport that we’ll tandem when they’re on the moon, but partly in-
have to go through on our way to somewhere else, dependently, which is where Hakamada’s profit-
where both the engineering and the economics of making idea comes in.
blasting off from a place with only one-sixth the Team Hakuto’s entry features a four-wheel rov-
gravity of Earth will make a lunar hub the ideal er—dubbed Sorato by the crew, after a song by a
way station in exploring the universe. Japanese alternative rock band—which in future
Water, now locked in the form of ice at the missions beyond XPrize will be tethered to a sepa-
lunar poles, would be both lifeblood and fuel rate, two-wheel tilting robot. Both units are made
source: water to drink, water to irrigate crops, largely of very lightweight, strong, carbon fiber
and water to be split into oxygen and hydrogen, components. Hakamada, a thin, thoughtful man
the former for us to breathe and the latter to pow- with a mop of unruly hair, who has been a space
er our spacecraft beyond this lunar base. Again, geek since he saw his first Star Wars movie as an
whether that will prove true, and if so, when, is elementary school student, said the smaller robot
unknowable. But what is known now is that the can be lowered deep into fissures, lava tubes, and
first destination of the emerging space industry caves. It will gather vital data on such spots, which
is obvious: the moon. could serve an essential function one day as tem-
porary habitats for future lunar bases, shielding
TO WITNESS A TEST MISSION of Team Haku- arriving humans for a period of time while more
to—Japan’s entry in the Lunar XPrize compe- permanent digs are constructed.
tition—I traveled last September to a remote, The Tokyo-based company Hakamada runs,
windswept region of western Japan known as iSpace, plans to leverage Japanese advances in
the Tottori Sand Dunes. For days, ferocious and technology miniaturization to probe, photograph,
very un-moonlike rain whipping off the Sea of Ja- map, and model the moon in much higher detail
pan pelted the coast, drowning out proper condi- than can be seen in the photos and soil-testing re-
tions for testing a lunar rover. In a nearby youth sults from earlier lunar rover missions.
hostel, team leader Takeshi Hakamada and his “We are not in this just to win a prize, although
colleagues were getting restless. Dressed in spiffy that would be nice,” Hakamada told me shortly
gray jackets with a rabbit logo (Hakuto is a myth- before the test run. “We are in this to demon-
ological white rabbit in Japanese folktales) and strate to the world that we have a viable technol-
tossing back energy drinks, they kept fine-tuning ogy that can produce important information that
software that carefully mimicked the communi- people will be willing to pay for.”
cations delay of 2.5 seconds between Earth and With wheels that each look a bit like an
the moon, nearly a quarter million miles away. old-fashioned waterwheel, the main rover
Then abruptly one evening the skies cleared reached a “drop point” on the dunes, a stand-in
and stars emerged. Amid a crackle of walkie- for the harsh lunar surface. It’s hitching a late De-
talkies, Hakamada’s team carted an impressive cember launch with the Indian Space Research
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Organisation, the government agency whose system probes and for closer observation of the
rocket will be carrying TeamIndus’s lunar rov- sun itself.
er as well. (To win the XPrize, a team must be On a pleasant March evening this year, the
launched by December 31, 2017, but can complete only sound at SLC-17 was a slight breeze from the
its mission in early 2018.) sea whistling through the rusting towers of the
It was quiet out on the Tottori Dunes as the complex. But behind a locked door in a former
clock neared midnight, the roar of the sea muf- maintenance shed, the prototype vehicle belong-
fled by the bluffs. Hakuto’s tiny rover looked a bit ing to the first U.S. company to receive govern-
forlorn out on the sandy simulacrum (a simula- ment approval for a space mission beyond Earth
tion of the lunar surface). Hakamada and his crew orbit was ready to hit the beach—on its way, ulti-
coordinated a series of computer-entered com- mately, to the moon.
mands through the lunar time lag, and suddenly To Bob Richards, once an assistant to famed
the rover clicked to life, cutting cleanly through astrophysicist Carl Sagan and now head of Moon
the sand, traveling just a few inches per second. Express, the beauty of the company’s MX-1E
It correctly sensed and navigated around sever- lander design is its dual-purpose utility. “There’s
al hazards placed in its path. This ability will be no need for a rover at all if your landing craft can
critical on the moon, where a large enough rock provide the same function,” Richards told me. In
or ditch could scuttle a whole mission. fact, he added, the Google Lunar XPrize is too of-
“The rover did great,” Hakamada said later, ten misconstrued as a rover competition.
beaming like a proud new father. In fact, he ex- “The greatest challenge of the GLXP is to land
plained, his confidence in its performance was on the moon,” he said. “Rovers can’t land on the
no longer his biggest challenge. “We believe that moon themselves, and in fact the term ‘rover’
the biggest problem for space innovation now is doesn’t appear in competition rules at all, just a
really not technology itself but the entrepreneur- requirement to accomplish mobility of at least
ship involved. To open new markets in space, you 500 meters.”
have to convince people this is for real—and thus Thus was born the idea of hopping to victory
defy all those old stereotypes about how only big by bouncing along with the help of thrusters. Af-
government agencies can undertake this sort ter an initial rocket launch to low-Earth orbit, the
of exploration. MX-1E—a single-stage robotic spacecraft that is
“That’s what’s great about this race,” he added. shaped and sized more than a bit like R2-D2 of
“Whoever wins will show it can be done.” Star Wars fame—will blast away using a super-
high-test hydrogen peroxide as its main pro-
A FEW STEPS from the Atlantic Ocean, on a pellant to travel at bullet speed on course for its
giant patch of Florida scrubland visited by alli- lunar goal. After establishing lunar orbit, Moon
gators, sea turtles, and the occasional bobcat, Express’s vehicle will eventually achieve what
Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex (SLC) engineers euphemistically call a “soft landing”:
17 appears at first glance to be a relic. From 1957 Aided by reverse thrust, the vertical descent will
to 2011, the site was used for both Thor and Delta nonetheless be violent enough to require cush-
rocket launches, the former for the country’s first ioning by a flexible landing-leg system capable
ballistic missiles, the latter for satellites and solar of absorbing the blow and springing back with
Team Hakuto, Japan .\RNR<RQH]DZDUHƄHFWVRQWKHWHDPŠVSURJUHVVDVWKHODXQFKGHDGOLQHGUDZVHYHU

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Team Hakuto, Japan 0HPEHUVRIWKH-DSDQHVHPHGLDDVVHPEOHRQWKHUHPRWH7RWWRUL6DQG'XQHVWRVHH
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WKHPRRQŠVVXUIDFHŢ:HZDQWWRGHPRQVWUDWHWRWKHZRUOGWKDWZHKDYHDYLDEOHWHFKQRORJ\ţKHVD\V
enough life to take on the next stage of the mis- was referring to the impact the Apollo space pro-
sion. With a small amount of fuel remaining, the grams had on youth in the 1960s and ’70s, when
MX-1E will take off on a big hop—or, perhaps, a the enterprise’s successful missions inspired
series of smaller hops—to travel the required dis- many of the founders of today’s leading high-
tance to win the XPrize. tech companies.
With his TED Talk–worthy profundities
and an industry reputation (not always a posi- ROUGHLY THE SIZE of a small refrigerator but
tive one) for the gift of gab, Richards makes it more circular in shape—a bit like a flying saucer—
all sound so brilliantly achievable that you’re SpaceIL’s lander is expected to weigh 1,323 pounds
tempted to invest. But there are arguments for when it detaches from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket,
holding on to your wallet—for one thing, Moon though about two-thirds of that weight will be fuel
Express is currently slated for launch not with used up by the time it is ready to land. With some
a proven carrier such as SpaceX, with its Falcon residual spring action in its legs similar to the MX-
rocket lines, but instead with Rocket Lab, a U.S.- 1E’s, it will use the little fuel left to hop the nearly
based company whose launch site at the Mahia one-third of a mile set by the XPrize rules.
Peninsula on the North Island of New Zealand The Israeli effort began in late 2010 as “three
opened this past September. crazy guys with not a lot of money but with the
Testing is just beginning this year, meaning thought that it would be really cool to land a ro-
that the firm will be on a very aggressive time- bot on the moon.” That’s how co-founder Yariv
table to achieve the XPrize’s stipulation of an Bash described the beginning to me during a visit
actual launch by the end of the year. Previous to the testing lab for the lander’s main computer.
milestone deadlines have been extended, but They struggled down to the wire to meet an ini-
XPrize says it is committed to wrapping up the tial competition deadline requiring them to show
competition soon. Thus it could conceivably end plans for a landing strategy and at least $50,000
with no winner, though a foundation official in- in assets.
sists it “really, really wants someone to win.” “We asked anybody we could for money,” Bash
The other team aiming to hop the distance recalled. “It got to where I was asking my wife for
needed to win is based in a small complex of in- money in my sleep.” While short on capital, the
dustrial buildings on the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Its group was not short on know-how: Bash is an elec-
leader is hardly less evangelistic than Richards. tronics and computer engineer who once headed
“Our vision is to re-create an ‘Apollo effect’ R and D efforts for Israeli intelligence forces. (“You
here in Israel, to really inspire a rising genera- know Q in the James Bond movies?” Bash asked
tion of kids to excel in science and technology,” me with a wink. “It was a bit like that.”)
said Eran Privman, a national hero and the CEO Their initial designs were far smaller—one as
of SpaceIL, whose eclectic résumé includes com- small as a two-liter soda bottle—than the land-
bat experience as a pilot in the Israeli Air Force; er they are assembling with parts from around
a doctorate in computer science and neuro- the world this summer. And rather than a for-
science from Tel Aviv University; and a range of profit enterprise, SpaceIL has wound up as the
research, development, and executive posts for only nonprofit in the remaining field of XPrize
several major technology companies in Israel. He competitors, with generous funding from two
TeamIndus, India $FRQFHSWPRFNHGXSLQIRDPIRUDYLGHR WRS HFKRHVDSURWRW\SHRIWKHURYHU(&$

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Ţ,IVKHJRHVWRRIDVWVKHŠOOVODPLQWRWKHPRRQţH[SODLQVRQHŢ7RRVORZDQGWKLVWXUQVLQWRDVOLQJVKRW
0DUVPLVVLRQţŞDQRWKHUZD\RIVD\LQJ(&$ZRXOGEHIRUHYHUORVWLQVSDFH
7HDP,QGXV
TeamIndus, India :LWK(&$DWUHVWHQJLQHHU/DNVKPDQ0XUWK\WDNHVDEUHDN7KHKXQGUHGSOXV
PHPEHUVRIWKHWHDPKRSHIRUGLYLGHQGVIDUJUHDWHUWKDQSUL]HPRQH\Ţ7KHUHDUHVXSHUEULJKWNLGV
RXWWKHUHLQWKHFLWLHVDQGLQWKHUHPRWHSDUWVRIWKHQDWLRQţVD\V6KHHOLND5DYLVKDQNDU QLFNQDPHG
Ţ-HGL0DVWHUţE\WKHWHDP Ţ:HQHHGWKHPWRNQRZDQ\WKLQJLVSRVVLEOH:HQHHGWRUHDFKWKHPţ
:DLW7KHUHŠVPRUH well-known billionaires, technology entrepreneur
/XQDU;3UL]HƃQDOLVWVWKDWODQGFDQ Morris Kahn and casino magnate Sheldon Adel-
FRPSHWHIRUDSRWRIXSWRPLOOLRQ son. Its mission now is essentially twofold—to
PRUHIRUDGGLWLRQDOKHURLFVRQWKHPRRQ win the prize, of course, but also to educate and
9LVLWDQGWUDQVPLWIURP inspire a new generation of potential tech leaders
DKLVWRULFOXQDUVLWH in a country often referred to as Start-up Nation.
As in India, national pride is clearly on the
million line here. Virtually every school in Israel now

has a teaching unit about the SpaceIL effort, and
schoolkids will be closely following the mission
7UDYHOƃYHNLORPHWHUV
once it blasts off for the moon, hoping theirs will
$2 million become the first country ever to send a privately

funded mission to explore the lunar surface.
“We wanted all kids in Israel to be heads-up
6XUYLYHDQGWUDQVPLWRQ about this,” said Privman, adding with a laugh:
WZROXQDUGD\V “We want these kids to be able to explain to their
$2 million
parents what’s going on.”
Enough with the hopping already. Hakuto,
TeamIndus, and a California-based interna-
3URYLGHSURRIRIWKH tional consortium known as Synergy Moon all
SUHVHQFHRIZDWHU plan to use a separate, wheeled rover to gather
data, which points up an arguable loophole in
million the rules: Hakuto could win by subcontract-

ing out both launch and landing, only needing
to deploy its Sorato rover to achieve victory.
Gonzales-Mowrer, the XPrize race director, says
that would be just fine: “We wanted teams to
come up with various approaches to accomplish-
ing the mission,” she explains. From a financ-
ing point of view, the main threshold is simply
that competitors must show XPrize judges that
at least 90 percent of their money comes from
nongovernment sources.
“It’s been fun to watch the teams network with
each other and with outside providers to drive down
the cost,” she said. “In that sense, the ultimate goal
of this competition has already been achieved.”
IF THERE IS TO BE a giant Walmart—or perhaps

an Ikea—for spacefaring ventures someday, then
Interorbital Systems, the primary company be-
hind the Synergy Moon consortium, is deter-
mined to fill that role. It aims to be “the lowest
cost launch provider in the commercial space
industry,” says its co-founder and CEO, Randa
Relich Milliron. To do this, she explains, it will
build rockets in modular, standardized units;
use off-the-shelf components wherever possible, from a barge at an ocean site off the California
including industrial irrigation tubes and micro- coast. With a humble budget they decline to quan-
controllers; and experiment with lower cost fuels tify publicly, but with grand dreams they describe
such as turpentine as propellants. expansively, it is hard to know exactly what to
In her office at the Mojave Air & Space Port make of them or of the Synergy Moon entry in the
in the California desert, a hundred miles or so space race, which their firm essentially anchors.
north of downtown Los Angeles, Milliron point- The team does have a verified launch contract,
ed with pride to the company brochure, which although it appears to be essentially with itself,
offers a do-it-yourself TubeSat Personal Satellite since it’s the only entrant in the race planning to
Kit for around $16,000, a price that “Includes do all the things needed to win—launching, land-
Free Launch!” and could drop to $8,000 for ing, roving, and transmitting—on its own.
high school or college students. Customers will “Sometimes we feel like renegades or outcasts,
assemble the tube (there is also a more expen- building these rockets by ourselves,” said Randa
sive CubeSat available) and outfit it with what- Milliron on a tour of Interorbital’s workshop. “But
ever small additional gear they can fit, such as that’s the whole point, really. We are disrupters.
a camera for tracking migratory animals from We are out to show the world this can all be done
orbit or sensors that can monitor weather condi- at truly radically lower costs.”
tions. The company plans to launch the personal From this Mojave Desert outpost to the Atlan-
satellites into orbit 192 miles above the Earth, a tic shore at Cape Canaveral, from the outskirts of
sufficient height to allow them to operate from Tel Aviv to the Japanese sand dunes and a Ban-
three weeks to two months, depending on solar galore warehouse, all five teams are forging ahead
activity, after which the devices will burn up safe- on their respective missions. Each is driven to
ly after reentering the atmosphere. win—but each is also surprisingly friendly with
Milliron and her husband, Roderick, have been its competitors. Over the past several years, even
working on and off for more than 20 years to get as the number of teams officially dwindled from
the company—and its rockets—off the ground. 29 to 16 and down to the five remaining at time of
It’s safe to say that several remaining and former writing, one of them has hosted an annual sum-
competitors in the GLXP race admire their pluck mit meeting for everyone else, as well as XPrize
but doubt their chances. Even if they reach the Foundation officials, with each leader offering
moon with one of their DIY rockets, their plan a frank presentation on successes and setbacks
to use a customized “throwbot” as their roving to date. Alliances have formed, such as an agree-
device on the moon has also raised eyebrows. ment between TeamIndus and Hakuto to share a
(Throwbots, throwable robots, are frequently ride on the Indian space agency’s rocket and the
used by the military, police, and firefighters to Indus lander, essentially duking it out once they
provide video “eyes” in a location too dangerous reach the moon. An industry is being born.
to enter, such as a terrorist hideout, a suspected “There’s really a ‘Yes We Can’ theme going on
meth lab, or a burning building.) here,” says Rahul Narayan, the charismatic lead-
Even so, the couple and a small crew of em- er of the 112 members working for TeamIndus.
ployees press on in their warehouse set amid “This is the time. How it will all evolve, exactly, I
the large, military-issue sheds and Quonset huts don’t know. I’m not sure anyone knows. But this
that make up the spaceport side of the dusty is the time.” j
desert complex—the other side of the runway is
a giant “boneyard,” where commercial airliners -RXUQDOLVW6DP+RZH9HUKRYHNLVEDVHGLQ6HDWWOH
such as old Boeing 747s and DC-10s have come DQGLVWKHDXWKRURIJet Age: The Comet, the 707, and
the Race to Shrink the World. 9LQFHQW)RXUQLHULVD
to die, parked for good and waiting to be cut up )UHQFKDUWLVWDQGSKRWRJUDSKHUOLYLQJLQ3DULV,QWKLV
for scrap. LVVXHWKH\ERWKPDNHWKHLUƃUVWDSSHDUDQFHLQNational
The Millirons say their initial launches will be Geographic PDJD]LQH

A Moon Museum
As a private lunar industry nears liftoff,
preservationists seek to protect the landing
sites that are the legacy of the first space race.
AT THE ABANDONED CAMPSITE, occupied for In 2011 NASA made a

less than a day, the visitors left much behind: so- nonbinding request that
no craft land within a
phisticated instruments and part of the ship that
PLOHEXƂHUDURXQG
carried them on this first-of-its-kind voyage, but the six Apollo sites.
simpler things as well—scoops and scales, canis- The agency still owns
ters and brackets, two pairs of boots. The expend- the rovers and other
able trash of a successful mission, too heavy to artifacts, but space law
gives it no standing to
carry home, lies exactly where it was tossed.
protect iconic footprints
On the Earth-facing side of the moon 48 years such as those made by
later, undisturbed by wind or water, develop- the last moonwalker,
ment or war, Tranquility Base is still tranquil. Gene Cernan (right),
“It’s like an archaeologist’s dream,” says Beth who said in 1972, “God
willing … we shall return,
O’Leary, of New Mexico State University, one of
with peace and hope
several preservationists who consider this pris- for all mankind.”
tine time capsule as deserving of protection as
any archaeological site on Earth.
The Google Lunar XPrize has offered a four-
million-dollar bonus for close-up footage of an
Apollo landing site. While the organizers and
teams have pledged caution, O’Leary and others
also worry about those who will follow—landing,
rolling, or hopping their robots dangerously close
to objects of immeasurable value to posterity.
O’Leary and colleagues have secured historic
recognition from two states, California and New
Mexico, for the objects at Tranquility Base, but
federal officials have balked at granting the same
for any Apollo site, wary that such a move might
be interpreted as a claim on the moon itself. The
UN’s Outer Space Treaty, which has governed ex-
ploration and use of the moon since 1967, forbids
any country from claiming sovereignty over it.
Protection, if it comes at all, will likely require
sponsorship from multiple nations, including
the growing number of countries whose probes
have left their own physical traces on the moon.
—Brad Scriber
Namesakes
Charles Duke never reached what
Apollo 16 dubbed Dot Crater, for his
wife, Dorothy, or Cat Crater, an
acronym for sons Charles and Tom,
but he did leave behind a backyard
portrait. Decades of exposure have
likely faded the image, but perhaps
the signatures on the reverse are still
legible, along with the inscription
WKDWLGHQWLƃHVWKHJURXSDVWKHIDPLO\
of astronaut Duke from planet Earth.
More Than
Exploration
Dropped onto moondust, some
Apollo artifacts are a record of
human nature: traces of scientific
curiosity, nostalgia, and whimsy.
Falcon Landings
“How ’bout that? … Mr. Galileo was

correct,” declared Apollo 15 com-
mander David Scott with feigned
surprise after testing that moon-
gazing scientist’s law: Without air
friction, objects of any weight fall at
the same speed. As cameras rolled,
Scott released a falcon feather from
his left hand and a rock hammer a
thousand times as heavy from his
right. They hit the ground simultane-
The Fallen ously. Three days prior, an understand-
ing of this principle had helped the
Only 12 men have walked on the moon, crew descend safely to the surface
but it took the best technological in their lunar module, the Falcon.
HƂRUWVRIWKHWKFHQWXU\ŠVWZR
dueling superpowers to get them
there. Countless people contributed;
some lost their lives. “Fallen Astro-
naut,” a 3.3-inch aluminum sculpture,
Swing and Pitch
memorializes 14 astronauts and
cosmonauts who died in the space
Their work nearly complete,
race. David Scott placed the stylized
the Apollo 14 astronauts
spacefarer and a plaque with their
turned to sport. Alan
names on the moon’s surface during
Shepard had attached a
the Apollo 15 mission. The next year
six iron to the handle of a
Paul Van Hoeydonck revealed himself
soil-sampling tool and, after
as the artist in an interview with Walter
a few attempts, hit two golf
Cronkite during the Apollo 16 launch.
balls, with one landing in a
A plan to sell replicas of the statue
crater a short distance away. Edgar
entangled the memorial in a years-
Mitchell followed up with a “javelin”
ORQJFRQWURYHUV\DERXWSURƃWLQJ
WKURZKXUOLQJWKHVWDƂRIDVRODUZLQG
from moon missions.
collector just past the ball. Both of the
objects were visible (forefront) from
the window of the lander as the pair
prepared to leave the moon.
ALL PHOTOS: NASA A MOON MUSEUM 65

This Japanese space-
craft delivered nearly
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Space Odyssey
Astronaut Scott Kelly reflects
on his yearlong journey aboard the
International Space Station
in this exclusive excerpt from his
memoir, Endurance.
66
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GLVFORVHVWKHSK\VLFDOŞDQGHPRWLRQDOŞFKDOOHQJHVRIORQJWHUPVSDFHWUDYHO
/RRNLQJGRZQDWWKHSODQHW from 200 miles

in space, I feel as though I know the Earth in an intimate way most people
don’t—the coastlines, terrains, mountains, and rivers. Some parts of the world,
especially in Asia, are so blanketed by air pollution that they appear sick, in
need of treatment or at least a chance to heal. The line of our atmosphere
on the horizon looks as thin as a contact lens over an eye, and its fragility
seems to demand our protection. One of my favorite views of Earth is of the
Bahamas (above), a large archipelago with a stunning contrast from light to
dark colors. The vibrant deep blue of the ocean mixes with a much brighter
turquoise, swirled with something almost like gold, where the sun bounces off
the shallow sand and reefs. Whenever new crewmates come up to the Inter-
national Space Station, I always make a point of taking them to the Cupola—a
module made entirely of windows looking down on Earth—to see the Baha-
mas. That sight always reminds me to stop and appreciate the view of Earth
I have the privilege of experiencing.
Sometimes when I’m looking out the window it occurs to me that everything
68 ALL PHOTOS: NASA

that matters to me, every person who has ever lived and died (minus our crew
of six) is down there. Other times, of course, I’m aware that the people on the
station with me are the whole of humanity for me now. If I’m going to talk to
someone in the flesh, look someone in the eye, ask someone for help, share a
meal with someone, it will be one of the five people up here with me.
This is my fourth mission to space, my second to the ISS, and I’ve been here
for three weeks now. I’m getting better at knowing where I am when I first
wake up, but I’m often still disoriented about how my body is positioned. I’ll
wake up convinced that I’m upside down, because in the dark and without
gravity, my inner ear just takes a random guess on the position of my body
in the small space. When I turn on a light, I have a sort of visual illusion that
the room is rotating rapidly as it reorients itself around me, though I know it’s
actually my brain readjusting in response to new sensory input.
My crew quarters are just barely big enough for me and my sleeping bag,
two laptops, some clothes, toiletries, photos of Amiko (my longtime girl-
friend) and my daughters, a few paperback books. Without getting out of my
sleeping bag, I wake up one of the two computers attached to the wall and look
at my schedule. Much of today is to be taken up with one long task labeled
DRAGON CAPTURE.
THE STATION IS SOMETIMES DESCRIBED as an object: “The International

Space Station is the most expensive object ever created.” “The ISS is the only
object whose components were manufactured by different countries and as-
sembled in space.” That much is true. But when you live inside the station for
days and weeks and months, it doesn’t feel like an object. It feels like a place, a
very specific place with its own personality and its own unique characteristics.
It has an inside and an outside and rooms upon rooms, each of which has differ-
ent purposes, its own equipment and hardware, and its own feeling and smell,
distinct from the others. Each module has its own story and its own quirks.
From the outside the ISS looks like a number of giant empty soda cans
attached to each other end to end. Roughly the size of a football field, the
station is made up of five modules connected the long way—three American
and two Russian. More modules, including ones from Europe and Japan as
well as the United States, are connected as offshoots to port and starboard,
and the Russians have three that are attached “up” and “down” (we call these
directions zenith and nadir). Between my first time visiting the space station
and this mission, it has grown by seven modules, a significant proportion of its
volume. This growth is not haphazard but reflects an assembly sequence that
had been planned since the beginning of the space station project in the 1990s.
Whenever visiting vehicles are berthed here for a time, there is a new ([FHUSWHGIURPWKH
“room,” usually on the Earth-facing side of the station; to get into one of them ERRNEndurance,E\
I have to turn “down” rather than left or right. Those rooms get roomier as we 6FRWW.HOO\&RS\ULJKW
kE\DXWKRU
get the cargo unpacked, then get smaller again as we fill them with trash. Not
7REHSXEOLVKHGLQ
that we need the space—especially on the U.S. side, the station feels quite 2FWREHUE\$OIUHG
spacious, and in fact we can lose each other in here easily. But the appearance $.QRSIDQLPSULQWRI
of extra rooms—and then their disappearance after we set them loose—is a 7KH.QRSI'RXEOHGD\
strange feature most homes don’t have. 3XEOLVKLQJ*URXS
DGLYLVLRQRI3HQJXLQ
Since before the space shuttle was retired, NASA has been contracting with
5DQGRP+RXVH//&
private companies to develop spacecraft capable of supplying the station with
cargo and, at some point in the future, new crews. The most successful private
company so far has been Space Exploration Technologies, better known as
SpaceX, which produces the Dragon spacecraft. Yesterday a Dragon launched
SPACE ODYS SEY 69

from a pad at Cape Canaveral. Since then Dragon has been in orbit a safe
10 kilometers from us. This morning our aim is to capture it with the space
station’s robot arm and attach it to the docking port on the station. The pro-
cess of grappling a visiting vehicle is a bit like playing a video game that tests
hand-eye coordination, except that it involves real equipment worth hundreds
of millions of dollars. Not only could an error cause us to lose or damage the
Dragon and the millions of dollars’ worth of supplies on board, but a slip of the
hand could easily crash the visiting vehicle into the station. An accident with
a resupply ship has happened before, when a cargo spacecraft struck the old
Russian space station Mir, though its crew was lucky enough not to have been
killed by decompression when the Progress crashed into its hull.
These uncrewed spacecraft are the only way we can get supplies from
Earth. The Russian Soyuz spacecraft has the capability to send three humans
to space, but there is almost no room left over for anything else. SpaceX has
had a lot of success so far with their Dragon spacecraft and Falcon rocket,
and in 2012 they became the first private company to reach the ISS. Since
then they have become one of our regular suppliers, along with the Russian
Progress and Orbital ATK’s Cygnus, and they hope to be ready to fly astronauts
on the Dragon in the next few years. If they can pull that off, they will be the
first private company to carry human beings to orbit, and that launch will be
the first time astronauts leave Earth from the United States since the space
shuttle was retired in 2011.
Right now Dragon is carrying 4,300 pounds of supplies we need. There is
food, water, and oxygen; spare parts and supplies for the systems that keep
us alive; health care supplies like needles and vacuum tubes for drawing our
blood, sample containers, medications; clothing and towels and washcloths,
all of which we throw away after using them as long as we can. Dragon will also
be carrying new science experiments for us to carry out, as well as new sam-
ples to keep the existing ones going. Notable among the science experiments
is a small population of live mice for a study we will be carrying out on how
weightlessness affects bone and muscle. Each resupply spacecraft also carries
small care packages from our families, which we always look forward to, and
precious supplies of fresh food that we enjoy for just a few days, until it runs
out or goes bad. Fruits and vegetables seem to rot much faster here than on
Earth. I’m not sure why, and seeing the process makes me worry that the same
thing is happening to my own cells.
We are especially looking forward to this Dragon’s arrival because another
resupply rocket exploded just after launch back in October 2014. That one was
a Cygnus flown by another private contractor, U.S.-based Orbital ATK. The sta-
tion is always supplied far beyond the needs of the current crew, so there was
no immediate danger of running out of food or oxygen when those supplies
were lost. Still, this was the first time a rocket to resupply the ISS had failed in
years, and it destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of equipment. The loss of vital
supplies like food and oxygen made everyone think harder about what would
happen if a string of failures were to occur. A few days after the explosion, an
experimental space plane being developed by Virgin Galactic crashed in the
Mojave Desert, killing the copilot. These failures were unrelated, of course,
but the timing made it feel as though a string of bad luck might be catching
up with us after years of success.
BACK IN MY CREW QUARTERS I get dressed while reading and clicking

through emails. Getting dressed is a bit of a hassle when you can’t “sit” or
“stand,” but I’ve gotten used to it. The most challenging thing is putting on
my socks—without gravity to help me bend over, I’m using only core strength
and flexibility to pull my legs up to my chest. It’s not a challenge to figure out
what to wear, since I wear the same thing every day: a pair of khaki pants with
lots of pockets and strips of Velcro across the thighs, crucial when I can’t put
anything “down.” I have decided to experiment with how long I can make my
clothes last, the idea of going to Mars in the back of my mind. Can a pair of
underwear be worn four days instead of just two? Can a pair of socks last a
month? Can a pair of pants last six months? I aim to find out. I put on my favor-
ite black T-shirt and a sweatshirt that, because it’s flying with me for the third
time, has to be the most traveled piece of clothing in the history of clothing.
Dressed and ready for breakfast, I open the door to my quarters. As I push
against the back wall to float myself out, I accidentally kick loose a paper-
back book: Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage, by Alfred Lansing. I
brought this book with me on my previous flight as well, and sometimes I flip
through it after a long day on the station and reflect on what these explorers
went through almost exactly a hundred years before. They were stranded on
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ice floes for months at a time, forced to kill their dogs for food, and nearly froze
to death in the biting cold. They hiked across mountains that had been consid-
ered impassable by explorers who were better equipped and not half-starved.
Most remarkable, not a single member of the expedition was lost.
When I try to put myself in their place, I think the uncertainty must have
been the worst thing. They must have wondered if they could survive, and
that doubt must have been worse than the hunger and the cold. When I read
about their experiences, I think about how much harder they had it than I do.
Sometimes I’ll pick up the book specifically for that reason. If I’m inclined to
feel sorry for myself because I miss my family or because I had a frustrating
day or because the isolation is getting to me, reading a few pages about the
Shackleton expedition reminds me that even if I have it hard up here in some
ways, I’m certainly not going through what they did. It’s all about perspective.
I tuck the book back in with a few other personal items. Maybe I’ll read a few
pages before I go to sleep tonight.
DRAGON IS NOW IN ITS ORBIT 10 kilometers away from us, matching our
speed of 17,500 miles per hour. We can see its light blinking at us on the ex-
ternal cameras. Soon SpaceX ground control in Hawthorne, California, will
move it to within 2.5 kilometers, then 1.2 kilometers, then 250 meters, then 30
meters, then 10 meters. At each stopping point, teams on the ground will check
Dragon’s systems and evaluate its position before calling “go” or “no go” to
move on to the next stage. Inside of 250 meters we will get involved by mon-
itoring the approach, making sure the vehicle stays within a safe corridor, is
SPACE ODYS SEY 71

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behaving as expected—and that we are ready to abort if required. Once it’s
close enough, my crewmate Samantha Cristoforetti will grapple it with the
station’s robot arm. This is a glacially slow and deliberate process, and this
is one of the many things that’s very different between movies and real life.
In the films Gravity and 2001: A Space Odyssey, a visiting spacecraft zips up
to a space station and locks onto it; then a hatch pops open and people pass
through, all over the course of about 90 seconds. In reality we operate with the
knowledge that one spacecraft is always a potentially fatal threat to another—a
bigger threat the closer it gets—and so we move slowly and deliberately.
Samantha will operate the robot arm from the robotics workstation in the
Cupola. Terry Virts, the only other American on board, will be her backup,
and I will be helping out with the approach and rendezvous procedures. Terry
and I squeeze into the Cupola with Samantha, watching the data screen over
her shoulder that shows the speed and position of Dragon.
Like me, Terry was a test pilot before joining NASA—in his case, with
the Air Force. His call sign is Flanders, after the lovably square character
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Ned Flanders on The Simpsons. Terry has the positive attributes of Ned
Flanders—optimism, enthusiasm, friendliness—and none of the negative
ones. I’ve found him to be consistently competent, and I appreciate that as
a leader he is a consensus builder rather than an authoritarian. Since I’ve
been up here, he has always been respectful of my previous experience,
always open to suggestions about how to do things better rather than getting
defensive or competitive. He loves baseball, so there is always a game on
somewhere on the station, especially when the Astros or the Orioles are
playing. I’ve gotten used to the rhythm of the nine-inning games marking
time for a few hours of our workdays.
Samantha is one of the few women to have served as a fighter pilot in the
Italian Air Force, and she is unfailingly competent in everything technical. She
is also friendly and quick to laugh, and among her many other qualifications
to fly in space, she has a rare talent for language. She has native-level fluency
in English and Russian (the two official languages of the ISS) as well as French,
German, and her native Italian. She is also working on learning Chinese.
For some people who hope to fly in space, language can be a challenge. We
all have to be able to speak a second language (I’ve been studying Russian for
years, and my cosmonaut crewmates speak English much better than I speak
Russian), but the European and Japanese astronauts have the added burden
of learning two languages if they don’t already speak English or Russian. For
Samantha this wasn’t a problem. In fact her Russian and English are both
so good that she sometimes acts as an interpreter between cosmonauts and
astronauts if we have to talk about something nuanced or complicated.
David Saint-Jacques, a Canadian astronaut at Mission Control in Houston,
will talk us through the capture process, announcing Dragon’s position as it
moves, controlled from the ground through each of its preplanned stops.
“Dragon is inside the 200-meter keep-out sphere,” David says. The keep-out
sphere is an imaginary radius boundary around the station, meant to protect
us from accidental collisions. “The crew now has the authority to issue an
abort.” This means that we can shut down the process ourselves if we lose
contact with Houston or if Dragon is outside the corridor.
“Houston, capture conditions are confirmed. We’re ready for Dragon cap-
ture,” Terry replies.
At 10 meters we inhibit the station’s thrusters to prevent any unintended
jolts. Samantha takes control of the robotic arm, using her left hand to control
the arm’s translation (in, out, up, down, left, right) and her right hand to con-
trol its rotation (pitch, roll, and yaw).
Samantha reaches out with the robot arm, watching a monitor that offers a
view from a camera on the “hand,” or end effector, of the arm, as well as two
other video monitors showing data describing Dragon’s position and speed.
She can also look out the big windows to see what she’s doing. She moves the
arm out away from the station—very slowly and deliberately. Closing the space
between the two spacecraft inch by inch, Samantha never wavers or goes off
course. On the center screen the grapple fixture on Dragon grows larger. She
makes precise adjustments to keep the spacecraft and the robot arm perfectly
lined up.
The arm creeps out slowly, slowly. It’s almost touching the Dragon.
Samantha pulls the trigger. “Capture,” she says.
Perfect.
The process of pressurizing the space between the Dragon and the station
(the “vestibule”) takes several hours and is important to do correctly. The
danger that Dragon poses to the station is not over. A mistake in vestibule
outfitting could cause depressurization—our air venting out into space. So
Samantha and I work through the steps one by one.
We wait to open the ISS hatch that leads to the Dragon until the next morn-
ing. When Samantha slides it out of the way, an unusual and unmistakable
smell hits me. Slightly burned, slightly metallic. This time it reminds me of
the smell of sparklers on the Fourth of July: the smell of space. After a series
of procedures we eventually open Dragon’s hatch, and our care packages are
clearly marked and easily accessible, as are the mice and the fresh food. Terry
and I distribute the packages to everyone, feeling a bit like Santa Claus.
I FINALLY OPEN MY care package in the privacy of my crew quarters. Inside

is a poem and some chocolates from Amiko (she knows I crave sweets when
I’m in space, though on Earth I don’t have much of a sweet tooth); a pair of
shoelaces for my workout shoes with toggle ties, because it’s hard to tie laces
without gravity; a bottle of Frank’s hot sauce; a picture from my identical twin
brother, Mark, showing twin redhead little boys giving the finger to the cam-
era, with a note on the back that reads, “Hope the WCS is working up there!”
(WCS stands for waste collection system, a space toilet); and a card from my
daughters, Charlotte and Samantha, their distinctive handwritings gouged
into the heavy paper by a black pen.
I put everything away, eat a piece of the chocolate, check my email again. I
hang in my sleeping bag for a while, thinking about my kids, wondering how
they are doing with me being gone. Then I go to sleep. j
SPACE ODYS SEY 75

| D I S PATC H E S | K E N YA
Warriors
to the Rescue
Trailblazing indigenous communities in northern
Kenya are working together to save orphaned elephants.
76
It’s feeding time for hungry orphans
at the Reteti Elephant Sanctuary
in northern Kenya. Established last
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Samburus, whose goal is to return
their young charges to the wild.
S TO RY A N D P H OTO G R A P H S B Y A M I V I TA L E
EUROPE ASIA
AFRICA
F
rom afar, the cries of a baby elephant KENYA
in distress seem almost human. INDIAN
OCEAN
Drawn by the sounds, young Sam-
buru warriors, long spears in hand,
thread their way toward a wide
riverbed, where they find the victim. The calf
is half-submerged in sand and water, trapped Samburu warriors
found this baby trapped
in one of the hand-dug wells that dot the valley. in a hand-dug well. Here
Only its narrow back can be seen—and its trunk, Lkalatian Lopeta (right),
waving back and forth like a cobra. a Samburu wildlife
As recently as a year ago, the men likely would ranger, and Reteti
have dragged the elephant out before it could VWDƂHUVJXDUGWKH
two-week-old at night,
pollute the water and would have left it to die. hoping that her mother
But this day they do something different: Using and the rest of the herd
a cell phone, ubiquitous even in remotest Kenya, will come back for her.
they send a message to Reteti Elephant Sanctu- But 36 hours later they
ary, about six miles away. Then they sit and wait. hadn’t, and the elephant
was weakening fast
Reteti lies within a 975,000-acre swath of from dehydration. So
thorny scrubland in northern Kenya known as the team bundled her
the Namunyak Wildlife Conservation Trust— up, hoisted her into a
part of the ancestral homeland of the Samburu truck, and drove her to
people. Namunyak is supported and advised by the sanctuary. Dubbed
Kinya, she was given
the Northern Rangelands Trust, a local organiza- loving care—but even
tion that works with 33 community conservancies with all the coddling,
to boost security, sustainable development, and she died weeks later.
wildlife conservation. The region includes the
Turkana, Rendille, Borana, and Somali, as well
as the Samburu—ethnic groups that have fought (February, March, September, and October) the
to the death over the land and its resources. Now Samburu deepen their “singing wells,” and ele-
they’re working together to strengthen their com- phants, desperate to drink, come to the wells too.
munities and protect the estimated 6,000 ele- Sometimes they lose their footing and fall in.
phants they live, sometimes uneasily, alongside.
The riverbed that the Samburu men have come THE WARRIORS don’t have to wait long before a
to looks dry and unyielding, but just below the Reteti rescue team arrives, led by Joseph Lolngo-
surface is water. Elephants can smell water, and jine and Rimland Lemojong, both Samburu. The
Samburu families, guided by elephants’ scrapings, men quickly dig out the sides of the well, widen-
have dug narrow wells to reach the cold, clean, ing its mouth so that two of them can step in and
mineral-rich elixir. Each family maintains a par- slip a harness under the elephant’s belly. Then
ticular well, which can be as much as 15 feet deep. the rescuers, grunting with the effort, hoist the
While drawing water, Samburus sing a rhythmic elephant into the sunlight.
chant praising their cattle, luring the animals to Now comes another wait, this time much lon-
the life-giving source. During the dry months ger. The hope is that the herd will return here to
drink and that the baby, reunited with its mother charges, under a dozen as of now, to the wild.
and family, will be safe. But after 36 tense hours As soon as the weakened baby arrives, Sasha
it’s clear that this isn’t going to happen. The ele- Dorothy Lowuekuduk, who prepares elephant
phant, swaddled in blankets, is lifted into the food at Reteti, readies a half-gallon bottle of spe-
vehicle and driven to the sanctuary. cial formula. Lolngojine, the sanctuary’s veteri-
Nestled within the crook of a half-moon- nary technician, examines the calf and smears
shaped ridge, the Reteti elephant orphanage was antibiotic ointment on any cuts. It’s decided that
established in 2016 by local Samburus. Funding the elephant, a female, should be named Kinya,
has come from Conservation International, San after the well of her misfortune.
Diego Zoo Global, and Tusk UK. The Kenya Wild- At Reteti heartbreak is a looming specter.
life Service and the Northern Rangelands Trust Like many calves who become separated from
provide ongoing support. The first rescued ele- their mothers, Kinya, whose rescue was so hard
phant, named Suyian, arrived on September 25. won, didn’t make it. “It’s so sad that Kinya died,”
The sanctuary’s more than 20 elephant keep- Lemojong says. “We all worked hard to make sure
ers are Samburus, all intent on returning their Kinya should get a second chance to live.” j
NGM MAPS WARRI ORS TO T HE RESCU E 79

Above: Mathew Mutinda, a vet with the Kenya Wildlife Service, crouches over 18-month-old Mugie, still
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of formula while Naomi Leshongoro (at right) empties one into a hungry mouth.
Above: A feel-good dirt bath is just the thing in the heat of the day. A coating of soil helps protect sensitive
elephant skin by acting as both sunscreen and insect repellent. Below: Leshongoro gentles orphaned Pokot
ZLWKWKHKDQGRIH[SHULHQFH6KHKDGFDUHGIRUDQGUHOHDVHGƃYH\RXQJHOHSKDQWVLQWRWKHZLOGEHIRUH5HWHWL
opened last year. A mother herself, Leshongoro views these big babies as her own children.
THE SE MEN SAY THEY ’RE THE SECOND COMING
OF JE SUS CHRIST. THEIR DISCIPLE S AGREE .
| PROOF | A P H OTO G R A P H E R’ S J O U R N A L
MESSIAH COMPLEX
83
MO SE S
HLONGWANE
ALSO KNOWN AS
The King of Kings,
The Lord of Lords, Jesus
In Eshowe, South Africa,
Moses Hlongwane
preaches to his flock
during his own wedding
ceremony—an event he
says marks the begin-
ning of the End of Days.
Moses says that God
identified him as the
Messiah during a dream
in 1992. At the time
Moses was working as a
jewelry salesman. Since
then, he’s preached in
Eshowe, Johannesburg,
and other cities in the
region. Moses has about
40 disciples.
INRI
(PRECEDING PAGES)
Near Brasília, Brazil,
followers of INRI (Iesus
Nazarenus Rex Iudaeo-
rum: Jesus of Nazareth,
King of the Jews) push
their messiah around
on a rolling pedestal.
A dozen disciples—most
of them women—live
full-time with the cel-
ibate 69-year-old in
his walled compound,
which is protected with
barbed wire and electri-
cal fencing. INRI takes
his name from the ini-
tials that Pontius Pilate
inscribed on Christ’s
cross. His awakening
came in 1979.
MESSIAH COMPLEX 85
Story and Photographs
by Jonas Bendiksen
‘SURELY I AM
COMING SOON.’
The Bible’s penultimate verse, prophesying the return of
Jesus Christ, has always fascinated me. When is “soon”? And
who is “I”? For the past three years I’ve followed seven men
who claim to be the Second Coming of Christ (five are shown
here). By immersing myself in their revelations and spending
time with their disciples, I’ve tried to produce images that il-
lustrate the human longing for faith, meaning, and salvation.
Religion is somewhat mysterious to me, probably because I
wasn’t raised with it in Norway. But I’ve always enjoyed read-
ing Scripture, and over the past decade or so my interest in it
has grown. I’ve found myself coming back, again and again,
to that mysterious line—a promise that Christianity has been
waiting nearly 2,000 years to be fulfilled.
If Christ were to come back to complete his work today, I’ve
thought, what would he think of the world we’ve created? And
what would we think of him? With these thoughts tumbling
around in my head, I decided to start looking for messiahs.
I found them the way you find everything these days:
through Google. You might think there’d be more people who
claim to be Christ. But while many can be called prophets, gu-
rus, or spiritual leaders, only a few meet what I consider the
minimum criteria: consistent revelations, years of scriptural
records, a following of disciples.
Each of these men is unique. The communities that sur-
round them are too. For most people, belief in a higher power
is an abstract thing. But for these disciples—most of whom
seem highly intelligent; none appear to be brainwashed or
crazy—it’s tangible. They can touch their belief.
Wherever I went, I tried to keep an open mind and sub-
merge myself in their reality. One thing I was struck by is how
extremely consistent several of these messiahs are. The New
Testament is full of contradictions, but each of these men has
a narrative that sort of reconciles those inconsistencies. In
some ways they’re more coherent than the Scripture we have.
I know a lot of people will dismiss these men as fakers or lu-
natics. But I’ve always thought that a fundamental part of the
Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, Islam—involves
the coming of a messiah. Those faiths may disagree about
identity and timing, but I think they agree on the basic prem-
ise. So if one accepts that, why couldn’t it be one of these guys?
For me this project has been more about asking questions
than finding answers. I hope it will get people to do the same—
to think about belief and who has the power to define it. j
AS TOLD TO JEREMY BERLIN

VISSARION
ALSO KNOWN AS
The Christ of Siberia
In an off-the-grid Rus-
sian village called Obitel
Rassveta (“abode of
dawn”), Vissarion sits
in the living room of
a disciple. Born Sergei
Torop, he had a revela-
tion around the time the
Soviet Union collapsed
that he was Jesus Christ
reborn. Founder of the
Church of the Last Tes-
tament, he now has at
least 5,000 followers;
many of them live with
him in several utopian
eco-villages in the Si-
berian woods. They’ve
built their own schools,
churches, and society.
Vissarion’s proclama-
tions have been pub-
lished in 16 tomes titled
The Last Testament.
MESSIAH COMPLEX 87
VISSARION ’S
FOLLOWERS
These disciples, all
vegetarians, share a
communal Christmas
lunch in Cheremshanka,
one of the community’s
five villages. Christmas
here falls on January 14—
Vissarion’s birthday.
Celebrations start on the
12th, with a daylong pil-
grimage through all of
the villages. On Christ-
mas Day thousands of
followers gather and as-
cend to a mountain altar
above Obitel Rassveta,
after which Vissarion
greets the crowd and
delivers a short sermon.
MESSIAH COMPLEX 89
JE SU S
OF KITWE
ALSO KNOWN AS
Parent Rock
of the World,
Mr. Faithful,
Mr. Word of God
Jesus of Kitwe walks
around a marketplace in
the town of Ndola, Zam-
bia, proclaiming the ar-
rival of the Messiah and
the End of Days. When
he’s not sermonizing,
the 43-year-old man
named Bupete Chibwe
Chishimba wears street
clothes, drives a taxi,
and lives with his wife
and five children in
neighboring Kitwe, a
copper-mining city with
more than half a million
inhabitants. This Jesus
says he received a rev-
elation from God when
he was 24. Shortly after
this image was taken,
a crowd of churchgoing
Christians accused him
of blasphemy. When the
crowd began to threaten
violence, Jesus of Kitwe
left in a hurry.
MESSIAH COMPLEX 91
JESU S
MATAYO SHI
ALSO KNOWN AS
The Only God
Atop a van in Tokyo,
Jesus Matayoshi deliv-
ers a fiery sermon as
part of his campaign for
a seat in the House of
Councillors, instructing
opponents to commit
suicide and threatening
hellfire upon transgres-
sors. During two weeks
of campaigning in
2016—he’s run in many
elections over the past
two decades—he drove
around Tokyo, spread-
ing his message. Many
people ignored him,
but he did garner 6,114
votes. Mitsuo Matayoshi
was born in Okinawa in
1944. In 1997 he founded
the World Economic
Community Party,
which bases its policies
on his identity as Jesus
Christ reborn. Jesus
Matayoshi says his goal
is to bring about the End
of Days via the demo-
cratic political process,
eventually occupying
the post of United Na-
tions secretary-general
and instituting the will
of God on Earth.
Jonas Bendiksen’s book

The Last Testament will be
published in September
2017 by Aperture/GOST.
MESSIAH COMPLEX 93
Nearly a billion people, more than half of them
in India, defecate outdoors every day. The result:
millions of deaths and disease-stunted lives.
The problem isn’t just a lack of toilets—it’s a
lack of toilets that people want to use.
A Place to Go
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94
By Elizabeth Royte
Photographs by Andrea Bruce
At 65, Moolchand, bandy-legged

and white-haired, has no problem
rising for his predawn hunts.
In fact he revels in them.
“I hide along the lane with my flashlight,” he to open defecation by 2030. It’s not impossible
says in a low, excited voice, gesturing down to make great strides: Vietnam, for example, has
the main road of Gaji Khedi village, in India’s all but eliminated the practice over the past few
Madhya Pradesh state. “And I look for people decades. Achieving the global milestone, number
walking with a lota.” six on the UN’s list of Sustainable Development
A lota is a water container, traditionally made Goals, would radically improve public health:
of brass but these days more often of plastic. Diseases caused by poor sanitation and unsafe
Spied outdoors in the early morning, it all but water kill more children, some 1.4 million per
screams that its owner is headed for a field or year, than measles, malaria, and AIDS combined.
roadside to move his or her bowels—the water is It also would help alleviate poverty and hunger
for rinsing. and improve education. Sick kids miss school,
“I give chase,” Moolchand continues. “I blow and so do menstruating girls whose schools lack
my whistle, and I dump out their lota. Sometimes a clean and safe toilet.
I take it away and burn it.” Moolchand sees him- India has been grappling with the problem
self as defending a hard-won honor: The district since before it won independence from Great
has declared his village “open defecation free.” Britain in 1947. “Sanitation is more important
“People get angry and shout at me when I stop than independence,” Mahatma Gandhi said, urg-
them,” he says. “But the government has given ing his compatriots to clean up their act. To some
villagers lots of help to construct a toilet, so there extent they have: The percentage of Indians who
is no excuse.” defecate in the open has declined substantial-
Defecating in the open is as old as humankind. ly in recent decades. But with the population
As long as population densities were low and the growing rapidly, census data suggest that most
earth could safely absorb human wastes, it caused Indians now live in places where they are more
few problems. But as more people gathered in exposed to others’ feces, not less.
towns and cities, we gradually learned the link The current prime minister, Narendra Modi,
between hygiene and health and, in particular, campaigned with the slogan “toilets before tem-
the importance of avoiding contact with feces. ples.” In 2014, before the UN set its 2030 goal,
Today open defecation is on the decline world- Modi declared his intention to end open def-
wide, but nearly 950 million people still routinely ecation in India more than a decade earlier, by
practice it. Some 569 million of them live in India. October 2, 2019—Gandhi’s 150th birthday. He al-
Walk along its train tracks or rural roads, and you lotted more than $40 billion for a latrine-building
will readily encounter the evidence. and behavior-change blitz called Swachh Bharat
In 2015 the United Nations called for an end Abhiyan (Clean India Mission), for which the
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World Bank threw in another $1.5 billion in loans. for washing clothes or bathing,” says a woman
Modi aims to build more than 100 million new in a pink-and-black sari, resting on a rope-strung
toilets in rural areas alone by 2019. Whether he’ll cot in the shade. “We have a lot of open space.
succeed is one question; whether the toilets will Why shouldn’t we use that?” Grassy fields dotted
make much difference is another. Indian gov- with wildflowers surround her village.
ernments have been building low-cost latrines In surveys done throughout rural northern
for at least 30 years. Millions of these simple, India, where open defecation is more prevalent
freestanding structures dot the countryside, but than in the south, people express a keen pref-
many are crumbling. And many more are used to erence for relieving themselves outdoors. It’s
shelter small animals or to store tools, bikes, and healthier, they say. It’s natural and even virtu-
grain—while their owners head out into the fields ous. Many rural Indians consider even the most
with their lotas. In India deep-seated attitudes immaculate latrine religiously polluting; a toilet
may present an even bigger barrier to improving near the home seems more unclean to them than
sanitation than a lack of pipes and pits. answering the call of nature 200 yards away.
Flies, however, can travel more than a mile.
IN THE SIDE YARD OF EVERY mud-plastered The children in Jawda know, from visits by
home in the hamlet of Jawda, several hours south- community health workers, that toilets are a
west of Moolchand’s village, stands a spanking- boon for health. A girl nuzzling a tawny goat
new concrete outhouse the size of a large phone explains with great precision how flies and fin-
booth, painted salmon pink. Inside, a white gers can transfer feces from the field to food and
ceramic squat pan funnels waste—sluiced by water, sickening villagers. “But if the toilet pits
water from a bucket or lota—through a pipe are small,” her mother interrupts, “we’ll have
into a four-foot-deep pit. The brick-walled pit is this filth near us. And if we get sick, we have no
designed to collect feces while allowing liquids money to cure ourselves.”
to seep into the earth. A small pool of water cra-
dled in a U-shaped bend in the pipe helps con- IN KHARGONE DISTRICT, in southwestern
tain smells and block insects from the pit. Flies Madhya Pradesh, I walk through the unpaved
breeding and feeding on feces are one of the main streets of a hamlet with Nikhil Srivastav, a policy
vehicles delivering infectious organisms back to researcher affiliated with the Research Institute
humans; one gram of feces can contain 10 million for Compassionate Economics (RICE). Led by
viruses, one million bacteria, and 1,000 parasitic two Americans, Diane Coffey and Dean Spears,
cysts. They infect us through tiny openings in our the nonprofit deploys both American and Indian
skin or by contaminating food and water. researchers to study the well-being of India’s
The health toll in India is staggering. Diarrhea poor, with an emphasis on children. Trailed by
kills over 117,000 children under age five each barefoot kids, Srivastav and I step over a thin,
year. Millions more struggle on with chronical- smelly stream, in which rat-tailed maggots tum-
ly infected intestines that don’t absorb nutri- ble, and into a neatly swept compound. There
ents and medicines well. The misery cycles on: we meet Jagdish, a retired tour-bus driver who
Underweight women give birth to underweight recently spent 50,000 rupees (about $780) to dig a
babies, who are more vulnerable to infections, latrine seven feet deep, instead of the government-
more likely to be stunted, and less able to ben- recommended four, and finish its superstructure
efit from vaccines. In 2016, 39 percent of Indian with blue dolphin tiles.
children under age five were stunted. But Jagdish doesn’t make much use of
The Swachh Bharat mission offers each house- this beautiful chamber. “It’s for my wife and
hold about $190 to construct a pit latrine—far daughter-in-law,” he says. Like many of his neigh-
more than other developing nations spend. In bors, Jagdish prefers to walk uphill into the bush
Jawda, however, nobody uses the latrines. “It’s to perform his daily ablutions. In rural India it’s
NORTH
AMERICA EUROPE ASIA
HAITI INDIA
VIETNAM
3 1
4
5
8
2
9
AFRICA
6
SOUTH Countries with highest rates
Percentage
AMERICA of population 1. Eritrea
7
that defecates 2. South Sudan
in the open 10 3. Niger
More than 40 4. Chad AUSTRALIA
5. Burkina Faso
25 to 39.9
6. Sao Tome and Principe
10 to 24.9
7. Solomon Islands
1 to 9.9 8. Benin
Less than 1 9. Togo
No data 10. Namibia
Cleaning Up an
Unsanitary World
The percentage of people defecating in Change in open-defecation rates MAKING GAINS
Vietnam has nearly eradi-
the open air declined worldwide from 1990 Vietnam India
cated open defecation.
100%
to 2015, with the most dramatic reductions 75% UN statistics based on toilet
construction show India has
in some of the least developed countries. made progress too—but
Yet nearly 950 million people still practice 50 some experts dispute the
44% extent, arguing in part that
this public health hazard—a challenge 39%
many of the latrines that
0.7%
augmented by population growth. 0 have been built go unused.
1990 2015 1990 2015
Percentage of children
XQGHUƃYHZKRDUHVWXQWHG
60% Burundi SANITATION AND STUNTING

Timor-Leste In many developing countries, the India
prevalence of open defecation has a
Eritrea
WHUULEOHHƂHFWRQFKLOGUHQ,WH[SRVHV
50
them to illnesses that cause malnutri-
Pakistan tion and stunt their growth.
About
Ethiopia Nepal
40 Indonesia 569 million
people in India
Sao Tome and Principe defecate in the open.
Nigeria
30
Togo
Haiti
20
Ghana
Number
of people
10 100 million
Dominican Republic openly
defecating 10 million
Brazil 1 million
25 50
Number of people per acre openly defecating
JASON TREAT AND MATTHEW W. CHWASTYK, NGM STAFF; KELSEY NOWAKOWSKI

SOURCES: WHO/UNICEF JOINT MONITORING PROGRAMME FOR WATER SUPPLY AND SANITATION;
SANGITA VYAS, RESEARCH INSTITUTE FOR COMPASSIONATE ECONOMICS
INDIA 1RUWKRI%KRSDOFRPPXQLW\RUJDQL]HU grooms whose assets don’t include a toilet.
6DQWRVKL7LZDULOHDGVYLOODJHUVWKURXJKDIDUP And yet, as I saw in Jawda, many rural wom-
ƃHOGGRWWHGZLWKKXPDQZDVWH6KHH[SODLQV en ignore these messages and still head outdoors
KRZƄLHVFDUU\IHFDOJHUPVWRIRRGDQGGULQN themselves. These women and girls may be reluc-
RƂHUVWRKHOSWKHPEXLOGWRLOHWVŞDQGWULHV
tant to break with tradition or may feel cooped up
WRVKDPHWKHPIRUWKHLUXQVDQLWDU\KDELWV
inside a latrine, especially one they lack the tools
or inclination to clean. Some may also prize the
opportunity to get together with their girlfriends.
considered the manly thing to do. Patriarchal Open defecation, as strange as this may sound to
advertisements indirectly reinforce that notion, Westerners, offers young women a welcome break
imploring men to build toilets, not for the health from their domestic confines and the oversight of
of the whole family, but to protect their wives in-laws and husbands.
and daughters from sexual harassment out in the Jagdish is proud of his latrine, which he built
bush and from the shame of lifting their saris out- with Swachh Bharat funding and his own sav-
doors. One campaign encourages brides to reject ings. His only regret is not digging his pit even
at all said they couldn’t afford to build the type
they’d actually use. RICE found that privately
constructed pit latrines were four to five times
larger than the 50 cubic feet recommended by
the World Health Organization. “That’s the size
used all over the world,” Srivastav says, “and a
family of six won’t fill it for five years.” Indians’
ideal pit latrine was larger still: up to 1,000 cubic
feet—larger than many Indians’ living space.
Why this obsession with size? “A smaller soak
pit will fill up in five months,” Jagdish explains,
erroneously. “Then I’d have to call a Dalit”—a
low-caste person—“to empty it.”
“Couldn’t you do this on your own?” Srivastav
asks. Jagdish shakes his head.
“There would be objections from the commu-
nity,” he says. “You’d be ostracized for cleaning
your own house.”
That pronouncement points to an answer to
the great puzzle of Indian sanitation. Why are
India’s open-defecation rates so much higher
than those in other developing nations, when
India is richer, has higher literacy rates, and has
more access to water? What sets India apart, at
least according to RICE, are rural Indians’ beliefs
about purity, pollution, and caste.
For thousands of years Dalits—formerly
known as Untouchables—have been forbidden
from drinking at the same wells, worshipping at
the same temples, or even wearing shoes in the
presence of upper castes. Modern laws against
such discrimination are rarely enforced, and
deeper. “Fifteen feet would have been better,” he poverty and violence still compel Dalits to do
says. Pit latrines have a huge drawback, you see: the nation’s dirty work. They clear carcasses
They fill up. And rather than empty a pit with a from roads, placentas from birthing rooms, and
shovel or hire a pump truck—or easier still, dig a human waste from pits and open sewers. Mean-
new latrine, which is standard procedure in oth- while higher caste Indians retain their status and
er nations—rural Indians, especially in northern supposed superiority in part by avoiding any
India, often opt to build no latrine at all. association with such degrading labors.
Three years ago RICE researchers collected In recent years, however, Dalits struggling
data on latrine use by more than 22,000 rural for equality have begun to shun the sorts of jobs
Indians. The team discovered that 40 percent of historically used to justify their oppression. And
households with toilets had at least one member so the cost of emptying a pit latrine has risen as
who continued to defecate outdoors; that people demand for the service has outstripped the sup-
with government-funded toilets were twice as ply of willing workers. Given this fraught social
likely to defecate in the open as those who built and economic landscape, it’s no wonder that
their own; and that families without any toilet some rural Indians save enough money to build
INDIA $IWHUFKDULWLHVVSHQWWRLQVWDOO
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taps in the street.
The High Price
of Modern Hygiene
Sewers connected to treatment plants are the best way of removing
the hazard of human waste, especially in cities. But they’re costly to
build and maintain. Collecting sludge from latrines or septic tanks is Paid by
an alternative—if the sludge is properly managed. Often it isn’t. utility
$52.63
A PRIVATE BURDEN Annualized costs per capita for

In Dakar, Senegal, sewer waste treatment in Dakar, Senegal
systems were found to be ǦǯǮǰǮ
QHDUO\ƃYHWLPHVPRUHH[SHQ-
sive than collecting and Paid by others
Paid by
managing fecal sludge. The $0.01
utility
latter method, however, costs $1.86 Ǧǫǫǰǭ
more for households, which
are responsible for their own $9.74 $2.00
latrines or septic tanks. Paid Paid by
by others household
$0.03 Fecal sludge Sewer-based
management systems systems
Schematic of a sewer
AFTER THE FLUSH

Sewer systems require a
huge investment in infra-
structure to connect all
users. The process varies,
but each toilet in an urban Pipes and sewers Primary treatment Aeration tanks Chemical treatment
Gravity-fed In a holding tank, The wastewater In some communi-
area must be connected to
conduits funnel solids settle out ƄRZVLQWRDHUDWHG ties, chemicals
large underground mains, wastewater from of the wastewater. tanks, where such as chlorine
which then feed into large homes and Oils and grease bacteria digest the are added to kill
wastewater treatment plants. businesses to a DUHVNLPPHGRƂ remaining solids any remaining
treatment plant. the top. and nutrients. bacteria.
OVERFLOWING CITIES Waste treatment in Delhi, India

Sewers aren’t guarantees: In
Delhi only 56 percent of waste Input Containment Emptying Transport Treatment End Use
is safely managed, because
Safely
sewers leak and nearly a third
managed
of the booming city isn’t con-
nected. Many latrines empty Sewers 56%
into open drains, and 4 percent 68%
of residents—some 700,000—
defecate outdoors.
Latrines
Unsafely
28% managed
JASON TREAT, NGM STAFF;
KELSEY NOWAKOWSKI 44%
SOURCES: LINDA STRANDE, SWISS
FEDERAL INSTITUTE OF AQUATIC Open
6&,(1&($1'7(&+12/2*<ǖ($:$*Ǘ
EMILY C. RAND, WORLD BANK; defecation
CENTRE FOR SCIENCE AND
ENVIRONMENT, NEW DELHI 4%
a latrine pit so big they’ll never have to empty it. and cleaning, but they also fill with litter, food
Or that hundreds of millions of them—most of scraps, and the urine and feces of children who
whom could afford a simple latrine—choose to can’t make it as far as the toilets. In stagnant reach-
conduct their business in the great outdoors. es, methane bubbles up through the gray-green
water, and the stench of rotten eggs—hydrogen
GLOBALLY MOST PEOPLE who defecate out- sulfide—wafts into homes. With so many peo-
doors live in rural areas. But in India the number ple so close together and so much fecal matter in
of urban slum dwellers who do so is on the rise, play, it’s not surprising to learn from a local health
as the population increases and villagers migrate worker that the colony’s major medical problems
to cities that are lacking in toilets, to say noth- are diarrhea and worms.
ing of sewer pipes and treatment plants. Today In other Delhi slums, street drains overflow
157 million people in Indian cities—37 percent during heavy rains, and water rises to mid-calf
of the urban population—lack a safe and pri- and rushes onto floors where residents sleep. Vis-
vate toilet. It’s a crisis and an opportunity, says iting several of these places, I hear one constant
Pragya Gupta of WaterAid India, a charity that refrain: “We want a sewer, and we want our own
works on sanitation: “It’s easier to do behavior toilets”—an aspirational leap over government-
change in slums because the need is right there, built latrines. But many slums are too crowded
in your face.” or structurally unsound for sewer lines, and the
Gupta and I are visiting Safeda Basti, a slum government is reluctant to provide services to
in East Delhi’s Geeta Colony. The narrow streets residents it considers illegal, on land that may
bustle with commerce, jousting children, and be slated for private development.
women washing dishes in the open doorways of So where’s the hope? Hacking their way
ramshackle homes. Laundry hangs from electri- through thickets of interdepartmental bureau-
cal wires, and toddlers crawl just inches from open cracy, WaterAid India and the Centre for Urban
drains. Lacking household toilets, people either and Regional Excellence, a Delhi-based non-
relieve themselves in rubbish-strewn lots or queue profit, recently raised $28,000 to install a small,
up at a nearby community toilet complex. shallow sewer line in one of Safeda Basti’s al-
I ask a group of women about the benefits leys. The pipe, which drops into a trunk line
of such facilities, expecting to hear about con- on the slum’s border, was completed in 2015.
venience, privacy, and safety. Instead I learn Within months 62 households installed latrines,
they’re universally reviled. “We have to stand in some atop their roofs, that emptied into the new
a long line because there aren’t enough toilets,” sewer—subtracting 300 people from the crowds
a mother says, “so our kids are late to school.” at the toilet complex.
“People fight,” her neighbor chimes in. “Girls All of a sudden seemingly intractable cultur-
are harassed at night.” The squat pans are dirty, al taboos had fallen away: It was OK to live near
faucets broken, soap absent. “We feel suffocated a toilet. The way Gupta describes it, the sani-
indoors,” a young woman says. Some complexes tation challenge in Indian cities is roughly the
don’t have roofs, a misery during the monsoon, opposite of the one in the countryside. Changing
and some lack electricity. As if that weren’t bad behavior in the city is relatively easy; building
enough, the complexes charge a few rupees per infrastructure—and maintaining it—are hard.
day and close between 11 p.m. and 4 or 5 a.m. At
night, people in need do what they must. FOR BEZWADA WILSON, a Delhi-based human
Batting away flies, I follow a street drain that rights activist who works to uplift Dalits, the
grows wider as it nears a fetid canal at the col- flush toilet is the only path to social emancipa-
ony’s edge. Eventually it will pour into the tion. “India has electricity and roads,” he says.
Yamuna River, a tributary of the Ganges. Drains “We deliver natural gas. And when it comes to
such as this one collect wastewater from cooking drains and sewers, the government doesn’t have
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infected feces contaminate water and food.
HAITI ,WWRRN)ULW]QHO;DYLHUŠVSDUHQWVVL[KRXUV develops, such amenities may become universal—
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question is how best to reduce that number.
PRVWIUHTXHQWO\DƆLFWVWKH\RXQJDQGWKHROG Technology can help. Waterless, solar-
,Q+DLWLLWVLFNHQHGWHQVRIWKRXVDQGVLQ powered toilets that are under development will
sterilize the waste they collect, making it safe to
use on crops or as charcoal. A cheaper, simpler
the money?” He shakes his head, incredulous. solution, available now, involves composting
Even in rural areas Wilson doesn’t see the point latrines that have two pits spaced about a yard
in promoting pit latrines. “More latrines will only apart. After the first pit fills, waste is diverted into
lead to more coerced manual cleaning,” he says. the second pit. Long before it fills, the contents of
Besides being expensive, however, flush toilets the first pit dry out, pathogens die, and the crum-
and sewers require running water, which many bly remains—high in nitrogen, phosphorus, and
parts of India still don’t have. As the country potassium—can be safely applied to farm fields.
latrine is never pleasant, she and Dean Spears
write in their book, Where India Goes. But in
other nations it’s at least not “a symbol of gener-
ations of oppression and humiliation.”
Parameswaran Iyer, India’s secretary of drink-
ing water and sanitation, acknowledges the role
that caste plays in sanitation. “But the Swachh
Bharat mission is actually helping to break down
barriers,” he insists, “because a village can’t
become open defecation free if different sections
aren’t ODF. The entire community is in it togeth-
er.” Iyer turns toward a hand-numbered sign on
his office wall. “You see that?” he asks. “One
hundred thousand is the number of villages that
are ODF today.” Just 540,000 to go, I note, three
years before Modi’s deadline.
Iyer remains undaunted. The government re-
wards certified ODF villages by moving them to
the front of the line for road or drinking-water im-
provements, he says. It has launched an advertis-
ing campaign that exalts Swachh Bharat mascots,
like the 106-year-old woman in Chhattisgarh state
who sold seven goats to build two toilets. It has
enlisted cricket and Bollywood stars to exhort
people to use the new latrines. On the subject of
emptying them, the ads are silent.
Meanwhile villages keen on ODF status are
taking action against violators—Moolchand
chasing furtive lota-carriers is just one example.
In some villages, watch committees post photo-
graphs of violators on the Internet or shame them
on the radio. Village leaders may even jail offend-
But the pit still does have to be excavated— ers or fine them 500 rupees—more than twice
and that has sharply limited the spread of twin- what a farmhand earns in a day—while district
pit latrines in India. “Villagers say, ‘No matter leaders may cut off government rations of rice,
how dry it is, it’s still poop,’ ” RICE’s Srivastav wheat, sugar, oil, or kerosene.
says. “ ‘Removing it will make me untouchable. All these measures are beginning to have an
People will not want to share a hookah with me.’ ” impact, Iyer says. “Even if there are centuries of
For RICE’s Diane Coffey, that prejudice is the old habits and beliefs, I think they are changing
nub of India’s problem. Teaching people that a little. The momentum has picked up.”
ordinary pits take years to fill, not months, is im- That may be true, but critics say the govern-
portant, she says; so are affordable pumps that ment’s analysis of the remaining challenge is
would make emptying pits more hygienic and less too rosy. Citing UN statistics, it says that the
disgusting. But the most important thing India open-defecation rate declined from 75 to 44 per-
can do to stop open defecation, Coffey says, is “to cent of the population between 1990 and 2015.
confront casteist ideas that make international- But that estimate reflects only the number of
ly normal latrine pits unacceptable.” Emptying a latrines that have been constructed—not the
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number that are actually used, consistently, by
every family member.
EARLY ONE MORNING IN A VILLAGE north of

Bhopal, more than a hundred people gather in
an open area, where Santoshi Tiwari, a sharp-
tongued field-worker with Samarthan, a region-
al nonprofit, tells them to sit down, close their
mouths, and listen. First she asks what they’re
proudest of in their village. The temple, they
say. And what gives them the most shame? The
human waste along the roads.
Like a Pied Piper, Tiwari then leads the villag-
ers past their temple and into a recently plowed
field, where she suddenly halts. “What is this?”
she demands, pointing toward the ground.
A few wags offer variants on the technical term.
Tiwari asks if the excrement can be identified—by
man, woman, child, or caste. “It’s from the low-
er caste,” a woman says, “because this is a lower
caste area.” Tiwari moves on: How many peo-
ple live here? About 1,500, a young man shouts.
Tiwari explains that each person daily produces
more than half a pound of feces, which means
the village annually produces around 300,000
pounds. The crowd murmurs, and Tiwari leads
them in a round of mocking applause.
Now she turns serious. She explains how feces
circulate through the village on the legs of flies,
in water, and in dust. She opens a bottle of wa-
ter, pours some into a plastic cup, and sips. Then
she plucks a long hair from her head, draws it
through the pile at her feet, and swirls the filthy sanitation,” an approach that has been credit-
strand in her water cup. The crowd steps backed with reducing open defecation in places not
ward; their faces contort with disgust. “Would plagued by caste division. Today’s gathering is
you drink this water?” Tiwari asks, proffering an opening salvo: Sensing commitment, Tiwari
the cup. “This is just one hair,” she adds. “Flies promises to return to help residents navigate the
have six legs.” paperwork for the government subsidy, purchase
Triggering disgust—by mapping and quanti- bricks, and train masons to build pits. Settling
fying feces and dipping tainted hairs in drinking who will empty them is beyond her brief, as is
water—is the hallmark of “community-led total what happens to the sludge—a long-standing
problem India scarcely has begun to address. But
even if the sludge is merely dumped in some far-
(OL]DEHWK5R\WH has written books on trash and water, off ditch, it poses less of a health threat than in-
and her last article for National Geographic was on
food waste. Andrea Bruce focuses on people living
dividual piles of feces on nearby roads and fields.
in the aftermath of war; she photographed Damascus Samarthan and other aid groups promote
for the March 2014 issue. twin-pit latrines and the harmless fertilizer they
yield. After Tiwari’s presentation I ask a village VIETNAM ,QGRRUSOXPELQJLQQHZHUVFKRROVKDV
elder, a non-Dalit, what he’d do after his pit was KHOSHGZKLWWOH9LHWQDPŠVRSHQGHIHFDWLRQUDWH
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full. “It will be like mud, so we’ll have no prob-
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believe him. But many others, in supposedly EULQJLQJKRPHOHVVRQVRQWRLOHWXVHDQGKDQG
ODF villages, have told me they’ll call a Dalit. washing to share with their families.
Back in the center of the village, Tiwari re-
minds her audience of the link between feces
and diarrheal illness and calculates that the phones, or a thousand kinds of funeral foods,
village spends tens of thousands of rupees a instead of on toilets.
year on medicine. “You are enriching the doc- She tries every argument. Then, after an
tors,” she squawks. “Imagine how you could hour-long harangue, Tiwari asks, “Should this
improve your house or your roads with that change?” “Yes!” the crowd shouts. “Who will end
money.” Tiwari appeals to their dignity. She open defecation?” she screams. A hundred hands
shames them for spending rupees on mobile shoot skyward. j
BOLT
FROM
THE BLUE
Can the shortfin mako, the fastest shark
in the ocean, outswim our appetite?
120
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By Glenn Hodges
Photographs by Brian Skerry
Z ane Grey made his name

writing adventure novels
about the American West,
but his real love wasn’t gunslinging or cowpok-
ing; it was deep-sea fishing. He held 14 world
records for catching saltwater fish, including the
first billfish over 1,000 pounds landed with a rod
and reel, a marlin he caught in Tahiti in 1930. But
distinguished from their much rarer cousins,
longfin makos, by, among other things, their
shorter pectoral fins (in this article, “makos” will
refer to shortfin makos)—are eagerly targeted by
recreational fishermen and frequently caught as
bycatch by commercial long-liners. Their meat
rivals swordfish in quality, and their fins are
prized in Asia for shark fin soup, a combination
nothing compared to the shortfin makos he en- that has put makos under significant pressure.
countered off the coast of New Zealand in 1926. But how much pressure, and to what ultimate
The first mako Grey got on the line was a effect, is uncertain. Scientists have no clear idea
258-pounder, and when he reeled it to the side how many makos there are in the Earth’s oceans,
of the boat, “quickly I learned something about and most of the data on catch and mortality rates
mako!” he wrote in his book Tales of the Angler’s come from commercial fishing operations, which
Eldorado, New Zealand. “He put up a terrific bat- famously tend to underreport catches. So biolo-
tle, broke one gaff, soaked us through with water, gists studying makos are trying to fill in some
and gave no end of trouble.” Once the shark was huge knowledge gaps.
landed, Grey marveled at its build—streamlined, In the summer of 2015 I was invited to join a
muscular, with a head like a bullet. “I had never mako-tagging operation off the Maryland coast
seen its like,” he wrote. “Every line of this mako with scientists trying to bridge some of those gaps.
showed speed and power.” I thought it would go like this: We catch big ma-
But it was the 1,200-pounder that the captain kos; they put on the kind of show that Zane Grey
of his boat battled that led to almost mythical saw; and I get great color for this story. Instead, I
superlatives. After a long fight in which the mako learned firsthand that Mark Twain was right about
“leapt prodigiously and made incredible runs,” seasickness (“At first you are so sick you are afraid
the shark bit through the leader and escaped. “I you will die, and then you are so sick you are afraid
was terrified,” the captain told Grey. “It seemed you won’t”) and was woozily indifferent when the
that mako filled the whole sky. He was the most
savage and powerful brute I ever saw, let alone
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fishermen on board reeled in two small makos, said, “Yup. Every one we’ve brought back to the
neither of which put up much of a fight. So I de- boat so far has had a hook in it.”
cided to try again—this time with a seasickness Removing a hook from a shark’s mouth can be
patch—in Rhode Island later in the summer. And dangerous, so fishermen just cut the leaders and
that’s when I saw what I really needed to see. leave the hooks to rust away. And because the
On each trip I accompanied scientists affil- fishermen are after makos, they’re much more
iated with the Guy Harvey Research Institute, likely to release blue sharks. “I’ve never seen a
which has been tagging and tracking makos mako with a hook,” the ship’s mate, Lucas Berg,
in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico since told me our first day out. “People don’t ever let
2008, with the primary objective of studying the them go. But we’ve caught blue sharks with four
sharks’ movement patterns. Makos in the west- hooks in their mouth.”
ern North Atlantic are highly migratory, traveling The fishing pressures on makos are intense,
northward during the warmer months and then Wetherbee explained. The ones we were trying
south as winter approaches. The excursions off to catch swim northward up the Atlantic coast in
Maryland’s coast in May were a resounding suc- the summer, and between everyday recreational
cess: Over two weeks, 12 makos were fitted with fishing and the dozens of shark-fishing tourna-
satellite transmitters. By contrast, the Rhode ments held between Maryland and Rhode Island,
Island excursions in August were a resounding it’s a perilous journey for the sharks. “A lot of
failure: one week, zero makos. But that contrast them have been weeded out by the time they get
offered a clue as to what might be happening up here,” Wetherbee said.
with makos in the Atlantic. “Is the catch rate sustainable?” I asked him. Ma-
To pick up on the clue, you have to know one of kos, like many sharks, are especially vulnerable to
the first things you learn when you’re fishing for overfishing because of their small litters and high
makos: They share territory with blue sharks. The age of sexual maturity. (One study suggests that
two species are kind of like lions and hyenas, co- female makos don’t reach maturity until around
existing in the same areas as they pursue different 15 years old or later, but these figures are not de-
feeding strategies. Shortfin makos are the fastest finitive. Biologists agree more research is needed.)
sharks in the ocean, capable of reaching 35 miles “We don’t know,” he said. “These are far-ranging,
an hour as they chase down speedy prey such as international sharks—some of our [tagged] makos
bluefish and tuna, and sport fishermen love their have gone into the waters of at least 17 different
power. Blue sharks, on the other hand, are rela- countries—and there’s not enough data for man-
tively laconic and focus on slower prey, like squid. agement agencies to come up with a good estimate
Catching them is like, in one fisherman’s words, of whether the population is going up or down or
“reeling in a barn door,” and their meat is not staying the same. There’s probably some number
nearly as good to eat as a mako’s. So you can guess of mako sharks that would be fine to catch and kill.
which one is the lion in the analogy and which is But we don’t know if it’s 100, or 1,000, or 100,000.”
the hyena. Everyone wants to bag the lion. According to the National Marine Fisheries Ser-
On our second day out of Narragansett, Rhode vice, which regulates fishing in U.S. waters, makos
Island, as we hauled yet another blue shark to the are being fished at a sustainable level. This assess-
side of the boat, I finally took note of the obvious. ment is based largely on catch figures supplied by
“It seems like all the blue sharks have hooks commercial long-liners to the international orga-
in their mouths,” I said. Brad Wetherbee, the nization that regulates fishing for tuna and other
marine ecologist from the University of Rhode pelagic fish in the Atlantic, and those figures show
Island who was there to tag any makos we caught, a relatively consistent harvest over recent years,
suggesting that mako populations are stable. But
Q Society Grant <RXU1DWLRQDO*HRJUDSKLF6RFLHW\ the figures are an imprecise measure. The catch
PHPEHUVKLSKHOSHGIXQGWKLVSURMHFW is recorded in metric tons, and basic information
like the number of sharks caught, and the size and Sport fishermen love
sex of those sharks, can be missing. On top of that,
many catches go unreported, leading scientists to
the mako’s power. It’s
question the reliability of both the data and the able to jump 10 to 15
stock assessments.
feet on the line, and
What Wetherbee and his team do know is that
the sharks they’re tagging are not faring well. The its meat is among the
tags they use—about the size of a Zippo lighter, tastiest of all sharks.
mounted on the dorsal fin—send signals to sat-
ellites every time the sharks surface, allowing
researchers to create detailed maps of their move- category, it turned out—was hoisted to be
ments. When the signals start coming from land, weighed. The anglers pulled up the snout for pho-
they know the sharks have been caught. “We’ve tographs, and the woman turned to the boy and
tagged 49 makos, and 11 have been killed,” Weth- said, “This is really cool, right?” The boy nodded
erbee told me. (Within a month, that number had silently, transfixed by the shark’s bloody grimace.
increased to 12.) I said that seemed like a lot, and As the sharks continued rolling in—147-pound
he agreed: The sample size is small, but the catch mako, 466-pound thresher, 500-pound thresher,
rate is troubling. 174-pound mako—I talked with the tournament’s
Back on land, I called Mahmood Shivji, the organizer, Shawn Harman. “What’s more fun than
Nova Southeastern University scientist who seeing sharks?” he asked, surveying the cheer-
leads the tagging project. “What amazes me,” he ing crowd. When we got to some of the knottier
said, “is that it’s a vast ocean out there and these questions about the controversy over “kill tour-
animals move a lot, and yet these tagged animals naments,” as critics call them (versus “no kill” or
are running into fishing hooks to the tune of 25 “catch and release” tournaments, which are rare
percent. No shark fishery can sustain a 25 percent but do exist), he explained that his tournament
removal every year.” was not like those of old—back in the 1970s and
’80s, when the sharks would pile up on the docks
AFTER MY SEASICK CRUISE, I returned to the and go wholesale into the Dumpster afterward.
Maryland shore for Mako Mania, an annual Here, the only sharks brought to the dock were
shark-fishing tournament held at the Bahia Ma- threshers and makos, the best tasting sharks in
rina in Ocean City. This Mako Mania should not the ocean, with minimum sizes and a catch limit
be confused with the Mako Mania tournament in of one fish per boat per day. (Over the course of
Point Pleasant, New Jersey—or, for that matter, three days, 16 sharks were brought to the dock to
with the Mako Fever tournament in New Jersey or be weighed.) “Nobody’s wantonly killing fish here.
the Mako Rodeo tournament, also in New Jersey, Everyone here eats what they kill.”
or with any of the other 65 or so U.S. tournaments I asked him where I might find mako on the
that include prizes for pelagic sharks like makos, menu, to see what it tastes like, and he fetched a
threshers, and tiger sharks. After Jaws hit theaters fillet from one of the sharks just brought in, had
in 1975, tournaments popped up along the eastern it blackened, and served it to me on a bun with
seaboard, and ever since, summer has not been wasabi mayo. It was delicious—as good as any
a good time to be a shark in the North Atlantic. billfish I’d ever had.
I arrived at the marina just as the first sharks But the tasty sandwich and the festivity of the
were being brought to the docks. It was a festive scene could not entirely conceal the problematic
scene—hundreds of people eating and drink- nature of the event. Later in the day, one of the
ing and cheering for the anglers and their kills. fishermen told me that a 500-pound thresher
Next to me a woman and a young boy watched shark brought in earlier had been pregnant, and
as a 282-pound mako—the winner in the mako when it was gutted, the tournament staff tried
BOLT FROM THE BLUE 133

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to hide the pups from the crowd. Threshers,
like makos, are considered “vulnerable” by the
International Union for Conservation of Na-
ture, and though killing the pregnant females
of vulnerable species may be legal, it makes for
bad publicity.
I asked Harman about the pregnant shark. He
denied the story, so I asked one of the guys clean-
ing the fish, and he said yes, there had been three
or four pups, each two to three feet long. I went
back to Harman to ask him why he denied it. He
got a little flustered and told me he was afraid of
being the “bad guy” in the story. “We’re following
the law, according to what the law says is sustain-
able,” he said. “If they make it illegal, we’ll stop.”
THE CAPTAINS OF THE BOATS I went out in for

those tagging operations in Maryland and Rhode 7KLVMXYHQLOHPDNR
Island are both longtime shark fishermen. They ŢFDPHLQKRWţVD\V
6NHUU\DQGGHVWUR\HG
are not reflexively against the capture and killing
SDUWRIKLVFDPHUDŠV
of fish, and they are not squeamish about what KRXVLQJ7KRXJKPDNRV
deep-sea fishing entails. But both men have UDUHO\DWWDFNKXPDQV
qualms about how sharks are being fished. WKHKXPDQWKUHDWWRWKH
Mark Sampson, the Maryland captain, started VKDUNVLVVXEVWDQWLDO
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a prominent shark-fishing tournament in Ocean
FODVVLƃHGDVYXOQHUDEOH
City in 1981 and ran it for more than three decades. EHFDXVHRIRYHUƃVKLQJ
But he became increasingly concerned about the
conservation of shark populations, so he made his
size limits more restrictive to reduce the number
of sharks caught. He also insisted that anglers use in August when we were on the boat waiting for
“circle hooks,” which, in contrast to conventional the fish to bite, he told me about the time a client
“J-hooks,” don’t lodge in a shark’s stomach when reeled in a mako that refused to go gently.
swallowed and result in fewer unnecessary kill- “I threw a harpoon in it, then I hit it with a fly-
ings. Some fishermen balked, participation de- ing gaff, and then tied it down to a side cleat, and
clined, and because of the higher size limits, he the thing is scratching and blasting blood every-
said, “we had days in our tournament where not a where, and it’s all being recorded by the client.
single shark was brought back to the dock. The guy sent me the video, and I watched it with
“That’s not the recipe for a successful tourna- my wife, and she asked, ‘Does that bother you?’ ”
ment, because people want to see those fish be- It did, he said, and he started trying to persuade
ing brought in and weighed,” Sampson said. He his customers to release the sharks they caught.
shuttered his tournament in 2014, and he doesn’t “I’d tell people, a 100-pound mako is just a tot, just
accept charters for anglers who want to use his a kid, because they have the potential to grow to
boat to participate in other shark tournaments. 1,000 pounds or more. So I’d really like to let it go,
Charlie Donilon, the Rhode Island captain, because it’s an immature fish.” But since almost
has run shark-fishing charters since 1976. Where all the makos they catch out there are juveniles,
Sampson is quiet and circumspect, Donilon is it stopped making sense to even ask the anglers.
talkative and emotional, and on one of those days So in 2015 Donilon instituted a catch-and-release
policy, no exceptions. His business has taken a hit. recreational fishermen—the Fisheries Service’s
“I’m way off what I used to be,” he said. statistics attribute the majority of the mako kills in
Donilon accepts the loss of business because the U.S. to recreational fishermen. So who is fish-
it doesn’t seem to him that the fishing is sustain- ing too much, and where? Empirically, it’s still too
able, no matter what the government says. “The soon to say. But Donilon, at least, doesn’t need to
sharks we tag, there’s like a gantlet they have to wait for more data to render his verdict.
go through coming up the coast. They’ve got to “I did my share of killing,” he said one after-
go through Maryland, New Jersey, Long Island, noon on the boat. “You know how there might be
Massachusetts—and everyone in the world is out a guy in Africa who used to be a poacher, and he
there fishing,” he said. “They’ve got to be at least used to kill all the lions …” And as he said this, his
15 years old in order to reproduce, the females. eyes teared up and his voice started quivering, and
Now what are the odds of that shark making it up finally he choked out a half whisper: “You’ve got
here 15 times without being caught? Pretty slim.” to give back. We just take, take all the time …” j
I thought of all the blue sharks we’d seen with
hooks in their mouths, and it seemed to me he was
*OHQQ+RGJHVZURWHDERXWRFHDQLFZKLWHWLSVKDUNV
right: pretty slim. Although most of the tagging LQWKH$XJXVWLVVXH3KRWRJUDSKHU%ULDQ6NHUU\
study’s casualties had been killed by commer- KDVEHHQQDPHGWKH5ROH[1DWLRQDO*HRJUDSKLF
cial fishermen in international waters—not by ([SORUHURIWKH<HDUIRU
BOLT FROM THE BLUE 137

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FURTHER
A G L I M P S E O F W H AT ’ S N E W A N D N E X T
ANCIENT SITES AS
S E E N F R O M S PAC E
By A. R. Williams
Archaeology isn’t always a dirty job.

Sometimes it means sitting at a com-
puter and studying satellite images
one by one to see if they show traces
of long-lost ruins or threats to ancient
sites. National Geographic Fellow Sarah
Parcak, a pioneer of what’s been called
space archaeology, has screened plenty
of those images herself. But she won-
dered if volunteers might be able to help.
In January she launched a crowd-
sourcing experiment that allowed
volunteers to be virtual sleuths in the
archaeologically rich country of Peru.
Dubbed GlobalXplorer, the project was
set up as a game using images from a
company called DigitalGlobe that cov-
ered some hundred thousand square
miles of farms, towns, and countryside.
The response was huge. “We got more
than 45,000 users and 10 million image
views,” Parcak said in April, near the end
of the project. “Which is a little bonkers.”
Identifying signs of looting, encroach-
ment, or a potential discovery involved
a learning curve, I found out. I played
for weeks before I realized that the faint
threads streaking across an occasional
image were power lines and the little
white beans strewn across some fields
could be livestock. I don’t know if I made
any big discoveries in the 15,000 images I
viewed, but other volunteers must have.
“The crowd was really, really good
at finding things,” said Parcak. “In one
small area alone, just north of Lima, the
users found almost 3,000 archaeological
features.” An initial review turned up
very few false positives. The results were
so encouraging that Parcak has plans to
begin surveying another country.
These are some of the satellite pictures

that GlobalXplorer volunteers considered.
6$7(//,7(,0$*(5<k',*,7$/*/2%(ǪǨǩǯ
G E T C LO S E R
T R AV E L W I T H N AT I O N A L G EO G R A P H I C
V E N T U R E TO T H E W O R L D’ S U N F O R G E T TA B L E P L AC E S W I T H N AT I O N A L G E O G R A P H I C . W H E T H E R YO U ’ R E
Z O O M I N G I N O N A N T A R C T I C A’ S P E N G U I N S W I T H T H E G U I D A N C E O F O U R P H O T O G R A P H E R S , H I K I N G
F R O M O N E M E D I E VA L V I L L A G E TO T H E N E X T I N E U R O P E , O R O B S E R V I N G E L E P H A N T S O N S A FA R I
W I T H O U R E X P E R T S , W E ’ L L G E T YO U C LO S E R T H A N YO U E V E R I M A G I N E D.
N ATG E O E X P E D I T I O N S .C O M | 1-888-966-8687
© 2017 National Geographic Partners, LLC. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPEDITIONS and the Yellow Border Design are trademarks of the National Geographic Society, used under license.
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at musings of an aeronautics graduate stu-

w ing part-time at NASA’s Jet Propulsion

EC L I P S E D BY WA R perfectly situated for refueling planes

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NASA has embarked on many successful

says Nicola Fox, project scientist for the Launch

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