For twenty-one years, the Swift space telescope has served as one of humanity's most faithful eyes on the violent cosmos, tracking gamma-ray bursts and black holes from low Earth orbit. Now, the same atmospheric drag that governs all things in that fragile altitude band is pulling Swift inexorably downward, and a robotic rescue mission called LINK — designed to push the observatory back to safety — has failed due to orientation control failures. NASA has bought time through careful maneuvering, but October stands as a hard horizon: below 185 miles, the telescope that outlasted so many expectat