I want to tell you about the night I cried looking at a photograph. It was 2041. The image had arrived three hours earlier — low resolution, compressed, delayed by the distance between worlds. It showed a red horizon. A thin atmosphere catching the last light of a sun that was not ours. On Mars, a small group of people had stopped their work at dusk to watch. They were watching a sunset on another planet. --- I have been thinking lately about what space exploration actually means — not the
