Ripples in the fabric of spacetime regularly zip across the universe from titanic cosmic events, such as the mergers of supermassive black holes millions to billions of times the mass of the sun. These so-called gravitational waves ought to be ubiquitous but faint, and no experiment has yet registered the disturbance caused by a passing wave. The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna was supposed to do just that. The spaceborne observatory, also known as LISA, was to be a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to detect gravitational waves and give scientists a whole new window through which to look on the universe and understand its underpinnings.
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