The Giant Magellan Telescope Could Rewrite Our Understanding of Space—and Earth. There’s a desert mountaintop in Chile—poised between the peaks of the Andes and the Pacific Ocean—that I visited recently. There, scientists are building the Giant Magellan Telescope, or GMT, which will be the most powerful ground-based telescope ever engineered. Its job will be to look deeply into space and capture images of the universe so detailed, so profound and so sweeping that they could—say the scientists building it—change how we think about human history and human identity.
I’ve been passionate about all things space for decades. I’m delighted we’re on our way back to the moon—and beyond—for commerce, science, strategic advantage, and more. Today, so much is happening so quickly to integrate the moon into our earthly supply chain. As far back as 2017, Jeff Bezos was talking about developing a lunar package delivery service within Amazon. Now, NASA is leading an effort called the Gateway Program. It’s dedicated to creating a lunar staging point for providing whatever cargo and equipment space travelers will need to support journeys into deeper space. Recently, SpaceX signed on as NASA’s first partner in this initiative, called Gateway Deep Space Logistics; they’ll help provision this lunar outpost. Soon, I believe, space won’t seem a distant frontier but just “part of the neighborhood” and an integral cog in the mega-machinery that gets this world’s work done.
Even as I write, women leaders are moving the needle in important ways on so many aspects of space exploration. NASA’s Artemis mission will put the first woman and the first person of color on the moon in late 2024—and that’s just the start. At Lincoln Road, we’re committed to supporting the women-led aspects of this journey because I believe the gifts women have for collaborative problem-solving and systems thinking are critical to our success in space. (Read more about two of the women helping us explore space in our profiles of former astronaut Cady Coleman and of Celeste Volz Ford, Founder and CEO of Stellar Solutions, an aerospace engineering firm.)
Another woman advancing our understanding of space is Dr. Angela Olinto, the Albert A. Michaelson Distinguished Service Professor at The University of Chicago and Dean of UChicago’s Division of Physical Sciences. She’s also a leading researcher in the field of astroparticle physics. When it’s complete, the GMT will be the largest public-private funded science project in history—the brainchild of an international consortium of thirteen universities and science institutions from five countries, including the University of Chicago. In the Founders forum of the GMT, Dr. Olinto represents UChicago.
She is eminently qualified to contribute in this way. A native of Brazil, Dr. Olinto came to the U.S. as a young woman to earn a PhD in physics at MIT. There, she was drawn to the study of particle physics, or understanding the tiniest bits of the atoms that comprise all matter. Her research led to inquiries about the source of these sub-atomic particles, which led to further investigations into the nature and structure of neutron stars. Her dissertation is still cited today, decades later, for its breakthrough science. In addition, she’s helped build giant telescopes before. She was a key contributor to the science behind the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina; more recently, she’s has been teaming with NASA on a series of missions that send high-pressure balloons into space to study cosmic rays.
Dr. Olinto is the person who invited me to Chile. Together, we traveled to the Atacama Desert near Chile’s coast that’s one of the highest, driest places on earth. The Giant Magellan Telescope is rising there, where the air is so clear and thin that stars carpet the sky at night and seem as near as our thoughts.
The telescope is absolutely incredible. At its heart will be seven giant mirrors that will collect starlight as the enormous telescope (all 22 stories of it) rotates, completing a sweep of the entire sky every three minutes. When the GMT comes online and starts sharing data with other observatories and institutions, we will be able to peer deep into parts of the universe we haven’t seen yet. Doing so could tell us if conditions for life as we understand it exist elsewhere—and also if forms of life we haven’t yet encountered are waiting there. (To learn more about this effort, please make the time to read The New York Times’s excellent feature from April 2023 about the GMT and the entire Las Campanas Observatory complex.)
One of the many things that intrigued me about our journey was the ongoing dialogue between contemporary artist Jeff Koons and Dr. Walter Massey, chair of the Board of Directors for the GMT (among numerous leadership roles), who were also on the trip. Artists and scientists have found common ground for inspiring and informing each other since the days of Leonardo DaVinci, if not before, but it’s not a collaboration we honor as much lately. It was an extraordinary experience to listen to these two great minds explore how the interaction of their disciplines can elevate human discovery and expression in both fields.
As we head for new frontiers, I’m thrilled to have women like Cady Coleman, Celeste Ford, and Angela Olinto helping lead the way. They remind me of how wise women can be, in a quotidian way that may escape notice. But when we watch them over time—like the stars silently wheeling above our heads—a story of power and bravery emerges.