Michael Johnson, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, presents the case for the Black Hole Explorer, a proposed space mission designed to capture the photon ring, the thin bright halo of light bent around a black hole's event horizon by extreme gravity. Speaking at the Institute for Advanced Study's Black Holes from Theory to Observations workshop, Johnson builds on the Event Horizon Telescope's landmark images of M87 and Sagittarius A*, explaining why ground based radio interferometry cannot resolve the photon ring itself and what a dedicated space based array could add. He walks through the mission's technical requirements, the science questions a sharp image of the ring could settle about general relativity near a black hole, and the engineering tradeoffs involved in getting multiple spacecraft into coordinated orbit. The talk is aimed at researchers already following black hole imaging but stays clear enough to follow without specialist background in interferometry.