Twenty-four hours in a space station in a low orbit round the Earth. Six occupants, technically four astronauts and two (being Russian) cosmonauts. The latter, Roman and Anton, are both male, but their western colleagues are evenly split by gender – Shaun is American, Nell is British, Pietro is Italian, and Chie is Japanese.
Twenty-four hours, but in that time sixteen ninety-minute orbits. Each orbit whizzes them through day and night on the planet below, experiencing sunrise and sunset continually. In between, in daylight, the sea, land, mountains, ice caps, forest, desert, savannah, rivers, and seas pass below. In darkness, only man-made illumination tells the land from the sea, the remote from the teeming cities. Each orbit shifts west revealing a different strip, which combine to cover the whole planet.
The views from space feature large, but so do the thoughts of the six crew – thoughts of home, of family, of the tension they feel between the pull of home comforts and the lure of the mission. But there are daily routines, chores, duties to distract them, from maintaining scientific experiments to cleaning the bathrooms.
The short book reads
nicely, oscillating between the profound and the mundane, placing the reader in
a strange but relatable environment. And though the zero-gravity workplace is interesting,
and the musings of the crew thought-provoking, it is the descriptions of the
panoramic views of space, the moon, and the blue pearl that is Earth, that most
stir the imagination.
