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The NASA technicians barely moved, their silhouettes backlit by monitors like scouts around a digital campfire. From a battered table in the control room’s back corner, Dimitri Krunenof watched them as purple dawn crept through the lab’s jungle of cables and machinery. He nudged his gooseneck lamp to keep the glare off his screen, and the numbers sprinkled across a diagram like a cartoon spiderweb. “All sensors ready.” How many times had he said that? He hadn’t quite been here a month at NASA Ames, but he’d spent the better part of his thirty-four years in laboratories just like this