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A masterful, genre-defying narrative of the most ambitious science project ever conceived: NASA's deep-space mission to Europa - the Jovian moon where might swim the first known alien life in our solar system - powered by a motley team of obsessives and eccentrics.When scientists discovered the first ocean beyond Earth, they had two big questions: "Is it habitable?" and "How do we get there?" To answer the first, they had to answer the second, and so began a vivacious team's twenty-year odyssey to mount a mission to Europa, the ocean moon of Jupiter.Standing in their way: NASA, fanatically consumed with landing robots on Mars; the White House, which never saw a science budget it couldn't cut; Congress, fixated on going to the moon or Mars - anywhere, really, to give astronauts something to do; rivals in academia, who wanted instead to go to Saturn; and even Jupiter itself, which guards Europa in a pulsing, rippling, radiation belt - a halo of death whose conditions are like those that follow a detonated thermonuclear bomb.