Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

He seemed to be full of this wanting, him and my uncle, like it made their own lives feel both empty and full at once. I didn’t like it. It put me off. To think of my dad’s face all hungry and lacking.

Nell thinks she knows it, that look, a look men get watching sports, football, say, in support of a team that affirms them by winning and then straight away negates them, because the glory belongs to the team, not the man sitting on the sofa who will never, now, be on a team like that.

I remember thinking – who’d want to be an astronaut? It seemed kind of crass to me suddenly, like they were projections of all the sad frustrated men of America.

I think, Nell says, when I watched the Challenger launch as a child, that was it for me. It wasn’t the moon landings, it was Challenger. I realised space is real, space flight is real, a thing real people do, die doing. Real

people, like me, could actually do it, and if I died doing it that would be OK, I could die that way. And then it stopped being a dream and became a – a target. A goal.

they were all familiar with Winnie-the-Pooh in one form or another in their five different countries. Winny-Puh l’orsetto, Pooh-san, Vinny Pukh: the same small animated bear there in some domain of their hearts. But

He’s never sure if man’s lust for space is curiosity or ingratitude. If this weird hot longing makes him a hero or an idiot. Undoubtedly something just short of either.

Ahoy mice, Chie whispers. Ahoy.

There are five units of eight mice – those untouched by the hand of science (save for the rocket that

propelled them here); those regularly

injected to stop their muscles wasting, and those born modified, bulky and fit fo...

The modified mice in group five, however, are bolder, as if they know by some instinct that their inflated size gives them greater advantage and power.

I’m sorry, she whispers, but none of you get out of

this alive. Not you small ones, not the big ones. You’re all toast. I’m sorry to tell you.

She will miss her mother’s bone-picking ceremony, when they comb the ashes for fragments of bone that survived cremation.

Missing that will be the hardest thing. The bone she’d most like to have found is the one that runs down the inside of the forearm, the ulna or radius, that long expressive bone she’d always see inside her mother’s wrist while her mother was washing or brushing Chie’s hair, the way its mechanism

Before he left earth his teenage daughter had asked him: do you think progress is beautiful? Yes, yes, he’d said, not having to think. So beautiful, my God.

but all those things are beautiful, because their beauty doesn’t come from their goodness, you didn’t ask if progress is good,

and a person is not beautiful because they’re good,

they’re beautiful because the...

like a ...

Alive and curious and restless. Never mind good. They’re beautiful because there’s a light in their eyes. Sometimes destructive, sometimes hurtful, sometimes selfish, but beautiful because al...

He heated some garlic cloves mixed with oil, in an old drinks sachet, thinking it would make an oily paste which he could drop into everything. But the sachet overheated and spilled and the oven, the galley, their sleeping quarters, the labs, smelled pungently of it for days, in fact weeks. In fact (since where do smells go in a sealed craft of infinitely recycled air) probably still does.

He can just about hear the radio. Something about Orion, brother of Artemis, the lunar astronauts’ spacecraft for their three-day journey and

moon landing. Artemis, the goddess of the moon, the arrow-pouring goddess of the hunt. Strange how the most cutting-edge science brands itself ...

Sergei Krikalev, the first Russian on the first expedition to the space station, the man who helped build it, the man who, before that, was sent to space by the USSR and was in orbit on Mir for almost six

months longer than planned, because, while he was there, the USSR ceased to exist and he couldn’t get home.

And his daughter is right to ask about progress, and he wishes he had not closed off the question with such certainty and sophistry since it’s a question that comes from an innocence of mind and begs for the same in its answer. He should have said, I don’t know my love. That would have been true. Because who can look at man’s neurotic assault on the planet and find it beautiful? Man’s hubris. A hubris so almighty it’s matched only by his stupidity. And these phallic ships thrust into space are surely the most hubristic of them all, the totems of a species gone mad with self-love.

But what he meant to say to his daughter – and what he will say when he returns – is that progress is not a thing but a feeling, it’s a feeling of adventure and expansion that starts in the belly and works up to the chest (and so often ends in the head where it tends to go wrong). It’s a feeling he has almost perpetually when here, in both the biggest and smallest of moments – this belly-chest knowing of the deep beauty of things, and of some improbable grace that has shot him up here in the thick of the stars. A beauty he feels while he vacuums

the control panels and air vents, as they eat their lunch separately and then dinner together, as they pile th...

be launched towards earth where it’ll burn up in the atmosphere and be gone, as the spectrometer surveys the ...

end of each day into his untethered sleeping bag and hangs neither upside down nor the right way up, because

two hundred and fifty miles above any ground for

God knows what. That’s what Michael Collins called it as he orbited the dark side of the moon alone – Aldrin, Armstrong, earth and mankind all over there, and over here himself, and God knows what.

The earth is a place of circular systems: growth and decomposition, rainfall and evaporation, alive with the cycling of air currents that shunt the weather around the continents. You know this of course, but in space you see it. The looping weather. This is what Nell could watch all day. A research meteorologist before she became an astronaut, she has an eye for the weather. How the earth drags

This typhoon that’s another ninety minutes bigger, ninety minutes bolder, and closer to land. It’s not anger, as people tend to say. It doesn’t look from here anything like anger. More like defiance, strength, vivacity, the bulge-eyed tongue-out warrior face worn in the haka.

When Chie heard of her mother’s death she instantly went to one of the few earthly possessions she has in orbit – a photograph her mother gave her before she left to come here.

Her mother is on the beach in a thick woollen coat, though it was July and must have been hot. On the back of the photograph it says Moon Landing Day, 1969

On the photo’s reverse now, under Moon Landing Day, 1969, it says, this time in her mother’s hand, For the next and all moon landing days ever to come. When

all of Chie’s courage she owes to her mother. Her resilience

and thickness of skin and preparedness for anything, even the difficult or painful or dangerous. Her daring and

went to the market. There were no remains of her grandmother. There were few remains of anyone at the Nagasaki munitions factory where her grandfather worked and where he would have been if not unwell. Everybody

mother – had gone to the market that day, her brief life would have met its end and Chie would not have later existed. Their family shuffled sideways through the crack of fate.

Even now she doesn’t know what she sees in that Moon Landing Day on the beach; she doesn’t know what to read into the strangeness of the scene, the incongruity of image and title.

She examines her mother’s face, interrogates the scowl for a clue as to what it denotes, but she doesn’t know.

What was so particular or telling or meaningful about it? Was it a mother saying to her daughter: and now I will show you what’s possible in your life, the near-limitlessness of what humans, and therefore you, can do? But then why the scowl, why not an expression of possibility or hope? Or was she saying: here are some men reaching the moon – do you see or hear a single woman among them, much less a non-white, non-American woman, do you notice that this is a collection of men in the full prime of their masculinity with their rockets

and thrusters and payloads and the eyes of the world on them – this is what the world is, a playground for men, a laboratory for men, don’t compete because any attempts at competition will end in your feeling dispirited and inferior and crushed, why run a race you can never win, why set yourself up to fail – so please know, my daughter, that you are not inferior and hold that grandly in your heart and live your inconsequential life as well as you can with a dignity of being, will you do that for me?

Or was she saying: look at these men going to the moon, be afraid my child at what humans can do, because we know don’t we what it all mean...