For twenty-two years, NASA's Swift Observatory kept vigil over the universe's most violent moments — gamma-ray bursts, stellar deaths, the catastrophic punctuation marks of cosmic time. Now, undone by the very star it orbited, Swift is falling. A $30 million commercial rescue attempt ended in mechanical failure, and the telescope will reenter Earth's atmosphere before October closes — a reminder that even our most far-seeing instruments are subject to the same gravity that holds us all.