Standing alone at night on the rim of a giant crater in a desert beneath the Milky Way, I had two strong feelings. First, I viscerally understood why Neil Armstrong said the lunar surface “has a stark beauty all its own. It’s like much of the high desert of the United States”. True enough, that night in the high desert of the United States looked to me a lot like pictures of the moon. Second, and more powerfully, I suddenly felt like all that open space was somehow crushing me, this tiny creature on the side of a cliff beneath the vastness of that black, endless, infinite sky.

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