How long does a day in space feel like?
Many people think it’s high time we sent a poet into space. Up there they would deploy their antennae and capture, in high fidelity, that most precious of commodities we’re running so low on back on Earth: wonder.
Until that day, we’ll have to be content with Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s slim and meticulous novel, which won last year’s Booker Prize.
The book is a twist on the tradition of novels that take place over the course of a single day It unfolds in an Earth day – 24 hours. Which is not the same as a space day.
The six characters are astronauts on the International Space station, barrelling around our planet at 28,000 kph. For them, every 90 minutes brings a new dawn. So effectively, they pass sixteen days in a day – a mindbending thought. (Would that tend to make you, as an astronaut, perceive time as moving more slowly or more quickly? A cool recent study in Nature examined just this question.)
Each chapter of Orbital is one revolution. Over the course of the day, and the book, the astronauts see the whole earth, because it’s rotating under them. Peering down from orbit is like painting the surface of a basketball that Zeus is slowly spinning on his finger.
Not much happens in this novel, and also everything happens. The book is a contemplation of how to get nowhere very quickly. Which may be the same as a contemplation of how to be everywhere right now.
When they’re not engaged in the routinized donkey work the job requires, astronauts want nothing more than to look out the window. They float, agog, nose to the tempered glass, trying mightily to commit to memory the majesty of what they’re seeing – the supersaturated blues and browns and whites, the familiar contours of landforms they studied in school, shapes in maps and globes that have now been magicked into real life in front of them. The challenge is to find words for an experience that is beyond words.
The irony is that these astronauts are living the dream of ultimate freedom and are basically infantilized – they’re living in a padded cell with soft food and no sharp instruments. The experience is “brutal, inhuman, lonely, magnificent.” People think it might be nice to go to space, “but there’s literally nothing about it that is ‘nice,’” Harvey writes. There is, however, much richness in the bizarre extremity of this undertaking. Food barely tastes. You hardly recognize your voice. You wake up in the morning and don’t know where your arm is until you look. How come astronauts don’t think to mention freaky stuff like this – or at least try to capture the otherworldliness of it for us? Maybe because the personality traits of the typical STEM-trained astronaut are level-headed, cold-blooded equanimity, “focus, optimism and pragmatism.” These folks are not, in the main, poetic souls.
But some are. In May of 2006 I interviewed the Apollo astronaut Edgar Mitchell for my book U-Turn, and he waxed downright mystical about a moment that changed him so completely he came to think of his life in terms of “before” and “after” it.
It was 1971, during the Apollo 14 mission. The spacecraft had lifted off the surface of the moon and begun its long journey back to Earth. Mitchell, the lunar module pilot, allowed himself, for the first time in the mission, to relax. His duties were mostly behind him. He lay back in weightlessness. Out the window he could see the little peninsula in Southeast Asia where he knew his younger brother was flying combat missions in a brutal civil war; the beauty of the earth belied the strife and suffering contained within it. And then that thought – all thoughts – were swamped by a feeling. It was as if he had “tuned into something incomprehensibly big.” He pushed away from the glass, and the feeling subsided a little. But each time he floated back to the window, it returned. It was a bliss he likened to romantic love, and within it was a “flash of understanding,” during which he perceived human life as purposeful in a way that’s impossible to articulate without sounding New Age-y. There was an “upwelling of fresh insight coupled with a profound sense of interconnectedness.” He saw himself as a point in a kind of evolutionary continuum, the work in progress that is the human species – an organism that is on its way to becoming something different. Better. “I realized I was part of a larger process than I previously understood.” (This kind of language, as you can imagine, gives NASA agita, and it distanced itself from Ed’s remarks.)
When you think about it, lower earth orbit, as supremely cool as it would be to experience, is not that far away. You could drive there in a couple of hours if you pointed the car straight up. Those Apollo missions were another kettle of fish. Those astronauts’ experience is harder for us to imagine. What a Mars voyage will do to a human soul is another level of speculation.
The day we do send a poet into space, that person may arrive at the same place Harvey does, which in a way resonates with what Ed Mitchell was trying to tell me. To see the earth from space is (or could be) a Copernican moment, humble and chastening.
“The demotion of earth from the centre to the periphery mirrors the story of any individual human,” Harvey writes, “decentering ourselves inch by inch.
“Maybe human civilization is like a single life. We grow out of the royalty of childhood into supreme normality; we find out about our own unspecialness, and in a flash of innocence we feel quite glad – if we’re not special than we might not be alone.”
