The Orbital Perspective

CHAPTER SEVEN

Camp Hope

On a late starlit evening in September 2010, NASA psychologist Al Holland and his colleagues, exhausted and lost in their thoughts, were traveling in a van along dirt and gravel roads through the high-elevation Atacama Desert en route to the Chilean town of Copiapó. The group had just left the feverish activity of the dusty Campo Esperanza (Camp Hope), where hundreds of workers were laboring to free thirty-three miners trapped below 2,300 feet of hard rock. Holland had the hectic image of Campo Esperanza still fresh in his mind. The scene reminded him of something out of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind—a little ...