chapter 8 alien earths in Search of wet, rocky Habitats The brilliant floodlights came on at dusk, with their crisscrossing beams pointed at the shiny Delta-II rocket perched on Pad 17-B at Cape Canaveral, Florida. The sky above was perfectly clear, with the Moon more than half full. The flawless liftoff occurred at 10:49 p.m. on March 6, 2009, as hundreds watched from within the Kennedy Space Center and hundreds more from the beach at Jetty Park a few kilometers away. One man among the select crowd within the compound, Bill Borucki, had waited longer, and fought harder, than anybody else to be there. The rocket's precious cargo-- a satellite observatory named Kepler, designed to search for transiting Earth twins around distant stars--was born out of Borucki's dogged determination in the face of repeated setbacks and obstacles for a quarter century. "The night launch was spectacular," Borucki told me. "At that moment, I thought of the hundreds of people who helped build Kepler. I felt as if their spirits were ris- ing into the sky with it." Kepler offers the best chance yet of finding an Earth- size planet in an Earth-like orbit around a Sun-like star--a world that is suitable for life as we know it. Over its three-and-a-half-year lifetime, Kepler is expected to