The ancient Egyptians believed that the universe emerged from an ocean called Nun, boundless and inert. At the beginning of time, a mound pierced the surface of the waters and rose from the void. Upon the mound stood the sun god Atum, who summoned the cosmos into being. Slowly, nothing became everything. Atum had two children, who had two children of their own: Geb, the earth, and Nut, the sky. They fell in love, as divine siblings often do, and conceived two sons and two daughters. The firstborn, Osiris, was the rightful ruler of Egypt, but his younger brother, Set, was consumed with jealousy. He murdered Osiris and dismembered his corpse, scattering it in pieces across the kingdom. The remains fertilized the Nile and made the desert bloom.

The story of our solar system, as astrophysicists know it, is not so different. It begins with another vast expanse of inert stuff—a cloud of gas and dust. Some 4.6 billion years ago, the cloud stirred, perhaps troubled by a passing star or the shock waves of a nearby supernova, spreading out into an immense disk that began to spin. At the center of the disk was a white-hot mass of plasma, which devoured most of the material around it and became our sun. Its energy and gravity sorted the rest of the disk by kind. The hardy substances, like rocks and metals, remained close to the center, where they coalesced into the inner planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. The more fragile compounds retreated to the far reaches of the disk, beyond what astronomers call the snow line, forming the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) and the frigid remainders beyond (Pluto, the comets, and the embryos of planets that never materialized). The story ends, of course, with life. It’s what happened in the middle—what made the desert bloom—that still has scientists flummoxed.

For a cell to survive, it requires three ingredients: nucleic acids, like DNA and RNA, to guide its development; amino acids to build proteins; and a lipid envelope to protect it from the elements. When life on our planet got its start, nearly four billion years ago, Earth was short on these ingredients. Where did they come from? The prevailing theory centers on a period known as the Late Heavy Bombardment. It suggests that, at the time, the solar system had not reached its current equipoise; the giant planets were on the move, and their gravity jostled free large numbers of asteroids and comets. Some drifted away into interstellar space, but others rushed inward, battering Earth with rock and ice. The onslaught lasted many millions of years, and though it brought unimaginable ruin it may also have seeded our planet with the chemical precursors of life. Very little now remains of that primordial Earth, but over the years meteorites have provided tantalizing clues of what might have fallen here, Osiris-like, from above. The Murchison meteorite, for instance, which struck rural Australia, in 1969, has been found to contain more than a hundred varieties of amino acid, along with the building blocks of lipids.

But meteorites, toasted in Earth’s atmosphere and sullied by its dirt, are imperfect specimens. So, in 2009, a team at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (L.P.L.) made a proposal to NASA: they would send a robotic spacecraft to an asteroid, dig up a pristine sample, and bring it back home. The aerospace company Lockheed Martin would build the craft in Colorado, with input and instrumentation from a host of other institutions, including L.P.L., M.I.T., the Canadian Space Agency, France’s National Center for Space Studies, and many of NASA’s major research laboratories. Dante Lauretta, the mission’s principal investigator and a dabbler in Egyptology, christened it OSIRIS. “I call that the backronym,” he told me recently. Then he and his colleagues threw in a suffix, “REx,” because they liked its dinosaurish sound.

OSIRIS-REx’s target asteroid was an ideal candidate. It was shaped plainly, like a sixteen-hundred-foot-wide lump of coal, and rotated slowly enough—just shy of once every four hours—to land on. It was also relatively close, approaching Earth every six years in its orbit around the sun. All that needed changing was its name, 1999 RQ 36 . In 2013, as the eight-hundred-million-dollar project came together, the Planetary Society, an American nonprofit, organized a contest to pick a new one. Michael Puzio, a nine-year-old from North Carolina, submitted the winning entry. Taking his cue from Lauretta, Puzio had looked into the annals of Egyptian cosmogony and found mention there of another deity—Bennu, a long-legged wading bird, who had landed on the mound of creation and let loose an omnific caw. OSIRIS-REx, with its solar panels flung wide, reminded Puzio of a heron in flight, and from then on the asteroid was known as Bennu. The scientists picked a date for launch: September 8, 2016.

For an American whose ideal of space exploration is the swaggering Apollo program, or the energetic prime of the Space Shuttle, the agency’s more recent missions can look a little sensible and middle-aged. NASA has feelers around the solar system—telescopes and satellite observatories orbiting Earth; two rovers on Mars; probes near Jupiter and Saturn and out past Pluto—but these days it only sends astronauts to the International Space Station, which is practically on our doorstep. Meanwhile, some of the world’s tech billionaires have promised a return to the excitement of NASA’s glory years. Richard Branson, with his company Virgin Galactic, has envisioned humanity’s first “commercial spaceline.” Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, is planning a similar venture with Blue Origin. (The company’s Latin motto translates as “Step by step, ferociously.”) Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal and the C.E.O. of Tesla Motors, hopes that his company SpaceX will eventually establish a colony on Mars.

Since the beginning of the Clinton Administration, NASA has accounted for a smaller and smaller percentage of the federal budget. (In his free time, Lauretta has created a board game called XTRONAUT, which allows players to put together their own missions. One of the game’s Action cards reads, “GOVERNMENT SHUTDOWN: CHOOSE A PLAYER. THAT PLAYER LOSES NEXT TURN.”) Last year, in a panel at the Council on Foreign Relations, Lori Garver, a former deputy NASA administrator under President Obama, spoke about the agency’s loss of purpose, blaming it not on scientists but on Congress. “NASA was the very symbol of capitalist ideals, as we went to the moon and beat the Russians,” she said. “Now what we’re working with is more of a socialist plan for space exploration, which is just anathema to what this country should be doing.” The question, she made clear, isn’t whether humans should go to space, or where they should go once they’re there, but how—with lumbering, expensive government projects like NASA’s future Space Launch System, often derided around Capitol Hill as the Senate Launch System, or nimble, private-sector ones developed by Bezos, Musk, and their ilk.

If these eccentric Silicon Valley projects seem daring, NASA’s are remarkably businesslike. OSIRIS-REx was scheduled to depart from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, on central Florida’s shimmering Atlantic coast, one of more than fifteen launches that will take place by the end of 2016. (Nearly all are destined for orbit around Earth.) The mission was temporarily headquartered just over the Banana River, on Merritt Island, which is two U.S. government outposts in one—the John F. Kennedy Space Center sitting smack on top of a national wildlife refuge. Together, these three federal zones are home to gopher tortoises, great blue herons, and a large fraction of America’s aeronautical infrastructure. Ruler-straight stretches of asphalt (NASA Parkway, Instrumentation Road) crisscross lush expanses of wetland pine and palm.