Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

But as Joan watched the Earth through the window now, it struck her as monumentally absurd that any of this had been a race with any opponent. Whatever the stated or unstated goals of the Apollo program, the achievements of everyone in space were shared, she thought, among us all. Humans had figured out how to put a satellite up there. Humans had gone to the moon. And sure, they were all Americans in that shuttle at that very moment. But for the space shuttle program to be an American victory felt so small compared to the victory that it could be, should be. Look what we humans had done. We had looked at the world around us—the dirt under our feet, the stars in the sky, the speed of a feather falling from the top of a building—and we had taught ourselves to fly. It was as beautiful an achievement to Joan as anything Rachmaninoff had written, as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, as monumental to her as the Great Wall of China or the pyramids of Egypt. Space belonged to no one, but Earth belonged to all of them.