The scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) desperately want to go down in history as the folks who photographed the first pale blue dot around another star. The first extraterrestrial orb that might harbor intelligent life. The second Earth.

But first they have to get off the ground.

Nobody is going to photograph another Earth through a telescope anchored to this Earth. It will have to be done from space, perhaps even from beyond Earth orbit, where there is no hint of atmosphere to disturb the faint incoming light. One idea is a flotilla of light-gathering devices that would fly in formation, separated by precise distances measured in millimeters, combining their efforts to allow for unheard-of resolutions.

A telescope that will make Hubble look quaint.

The effort, for now, is a bit like wishing upon a star. Nobody knows how to do it, what it will look like, or whether it will ever fly.

So Gary Blackwood and his colleagues began four years ago creating their own star in a JPL laboratory here in the hills above Pasadena, a fake star on which 56 employees of JPL and partner Ball Aerospace are now pinning their hopes, and around which they're hanging some hardware and building a prototype of the dream telescope that may or may not fly.

Blackwood is the instrument manager for the telescope, called StarLight. It is an incredibly ambitious and costly leap of technology, but a scientifically modest step in the search for another Earth: StarLight will merely spot stars, not planets. It is intended to be a working device that accomplishes no new science but that would lay the groundwork for one of a handful of more ambitious missions now just in the talking phases.

One of those possible future missions is aptly labeled Terrestrial Planet Finder, or TPF.

"StarLight is the first step, proving that you can find the star," said Leslie Livesay, overall manager of the project. "Then Terrestrial Planet Finder will go further and find the planet. But we have a long way to go in technology development to prove that we can do what's needed for TPF."

StarLight alone requires a giant technological leap. Especially now.

The daughter craft would feed their light to the mother craft centered precisely between them. For it to work, the light from the two daughter ships must travel exactly the same distance and arrive at the same instant.

But three years ago, in the continuing effort to squeeze intellectual blood out of an ever-shrinking JPL turnip, NASA pulled one leg out from under the StarLight stool and told the team to shave $50 million from the mission -- the equivalent of one of the three telescopes.

"We originally proposed a three-spacecraft mission, but NASA did not have enough money," Blackwood says. "We were close to being cancelled three years ago."

The team needed a breakthrough to save the mission, some whizbang, Einstein-like physics idea that could drastically reduce the overall price tag and make StarLight a two-telescope mission. But no one had a clue how to make interferometry work with just two spacecraft.

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