On a Friday in late July, wildfire swept through the hills west of Madrid and forced the evacuation of NASA's Deep Space Communications Complex, silencing one of only three stations on Earth capable of maintaining humanity's ongoing conversation with spacecraft at the edge of the solar system. The network—a planetary-scale ear pressed to the cosmos—redistributed its burden to California and Australia, but the margin for error has narrowed in ways that will matter when human missions to the Moon resume. In the immediate crisis, no contact with any of the 40-plus active missions was lost; in the
Spanish wildfire forces evacuation of NASA's critical Deep Space Network hub
Over 19,000 people evacuated from towns west of Madrid due to wildfires; surrounding communities experiencing significant impact.