The 18-story silhouette of the nearly completed Vera C. Rubin Observatory loomed above as I looked over a field of construction remnants a few weeks back. Beside me were two-ton custom jigs and dozens of shipping mounts resembling modern art. Within eyeshot were one-to-one-scale mass surrogates representing complex telescope parts and a swimming-pool-size bulletproof crate that had held the observatory's large reflecting mirror'a 37,000-pound glass object as fragile as a teacup'on its journey across continents and waves to this mountaintop, Cerro Pachon. This ridge, on the edge of the Atacama Desert in Chile, some 9,000 feet above sea level, is now home to three of the world's most powerful telescopes, including Rubin. It's also probably one of the most unforgiving locations in the world to try to build anything, let alone something as complex as an observatory. Yet these same conditions'distance from anthropogenic light sources, a mountainous altitude above the cloud line, a crisp...
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