The first singularity you’ll notice about THE MISSION by David W. Brown is its 82-word subtitle. The lettering takes up the lion share of the cover and pushes an image of Europa nearly out of view. It’s an apt metaphor for the many mysteries of this Jovian moon that are beyond our reach. There is a global ocean under the planet’s thick crust of ice that is three times larger than Earth’s and contains the three components thought vital to creating life as we know it: water, organic molecules, and chemical energy. Scientists guess that it takes five hundred million years to create a simple lifeform, and Europa’s ocean has existed for more than four billion.

Working within the outer planets community at NASA, is a small team of steadfast scientists that has built and rebuilt the future space mission to Europa. Now back to that subtitle:
How a Disciple of Carl Sagan, an Ex-Motocross Racer, a Texas Tea Party Congressman, the World's Worst Typewriter Saleswoman, California Mountain People, and an Anonymous NASA Functionary Went to War with Mars, Survived an Insurgency at Saturn, Traded Blows with Washington, and Stole a Ride on an Alabama Moon Rocket to Send a Space Robot to Jupiter in Search of the Second Garden of Eden at the Bottom of an Alien Ocean Inside of an Ice World Called Europa (A True Story).

It’s the most artful book summary I’ve ever seen. That Brown could condense 380 pages filled with detailed personal backgrounds, innerworkings of NASA, the Big Bang Theory, early astronomy, planetary geology, Washington politics, military strategy, and even 2001: A Space Odyssey trivia, into such playful language speaks to Brown’s talent as a writer.

The pace is exploratory as each member of the team is introduced with backstory leading up to the present. As a team collaborating behind the scenes at NASA, they solve seemingly impossible challenges: maximizing scientific outcomes with equipment that can withstand the Jovian radiation belt, reaching Europa’s liquid water below 19-25 kilometers of ice, and competing against rival teams for billions of dollars in a zero-sum game amid budget reductions.

David W. Brown’s research is faultless. Any reader will be gobsmacked by his level of detail, but where Brown shines is creative non-fiction. His dynamic literary prose is brimming with personality that is friendly and fun-loving, but still sharp with perfect comedic timing. No other writer could have delivered this story in the same way. Here’s Brown giving our first glimpse of Europa:

“Looking down and to the horizon, an astronaut on Europa is casting her eyes across a post-apocalyptic Antarctica: an endless tundra of gashed ice. In places, it is snowman white—the stuff of pure water. Elsewhere, it is sepia, seared and poisoned by the radiation belt into which Europa is submerged. Those gashes: in shadows they are cinnamon, scarlet, sienna, and they break up the landscape as though the whole world had been smashed on a marble floor and then reassembled haphazardly. There are steep cliffs and deep troughs and Grand Canyons of ice the color of prison cells.”

As much as Brown can wax poetic about planets and their moons, he can also deliver a swift, philosophical punch to the gut: “The Dark Ages are always only a day away.” Packed with science and human insight, books like THE MISSION are the light that keep those Dark Ages at bay.

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Review: THE MISSION by David W. Brown