Series · Project Starshade

The Starshade Arc

Somewhere out there is a world like ours: an Earth-sized planet, the right distance from a Sun-like star, that might just be home to something alive. We can't yet tell. The planet's light is buried in the glare of its star, which outshines it ten billion to one — and until you can pull that faint light out on its own and split it apart to read the chemistry of its atmosphere, you can't say whether anything is there at all. This series is about the strangest and most elegant idea anyone has had for pulling it off: not a bigger telescope, but a second spacecraft, a giant flower-shaped screen flown far ahead of the telescope, casting a precise shadow back across a gulf wider than the Earth to blot out the star and let the planet's light slip through cleanly. What almost no one knows is that the idea is more than sixty years old, written down and then nearly forgotten, and carried forward ever since by a small community of scientists across generations, through a hard-won revival and years of quiet argument over whether to build it at all. Along the way we'll meet the people who have bet their careers on it, reflect on the decisions that shaped its fate, and follow the science down to the honest question waiting at the end: whether this machine will ever fly, and what that single point of light would finally tell us if it did.