Science Friday - ‘Orbital’ Imagines The Inner Lives Of Astronauts On The ISS

Episode Date: January 21, 2025

From down here on Earth, life on the International Space Station seems magnificent: floating through the day, enjoying stunning views out your window, having an experience only a handful of other people will ever get.But what’s it really like to live up there? How does experiencing 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every day change your perception of time? How do you cope with being so far from the people you love?Those are some of the questions explored in the novel Orbital, which won the Booker Prize late last year. In the book, author Samantha Harvey imagines the inner life of astronauts aboard the ISS.Host Flora Lichtman is joined by Samantha Harvey, along with astronaut Dr. Cady Coleman, who spent almost six months on the Space Station, and is an author herself. They talk about the unexpected mundanities of living in space, how Harvey was inspired to write the book during lockdown, and how astronauts make sense of their new reality when separated from the rest of humanity.Transcripts for each segment will be available after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichten. As promised, we have a special extended cup for you. Today on the podcast, a conversation about experiencing versus imagining life and space. I kept wondering, are my imaginative capacities going to be enough to escape the prism of my own non-astronautness? From Earth, living on the International Space Station can seem, I don't know, kind of magical. Floating through the day, the view out your window is. stunning, you're having this experience only a handful of other people will ever get. But what's it really like? How does experiencing 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every day change your perception of time?

How do you cope with being so far from the people that you love? These are some of the questions explored in the new novel, Orbital, which won the Booker Prize late last year. The author Samantha Harvey imagines the inner life of astronauts aboard the ISS. which is why I really wanted to put Samantha in conversation with an astronaut who lived that life. So today we have novelist Samantha Harvey, along with astronaut Katie Coleman. Katie spent almost six months on the International Space Station and is an author herself. She's joining us from New England Public Media in Emmerst, Massachusetts. I am so thrilled to have you both on to talk about this book and life in space.

Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, hi, Flora. Hi, Katie. So nice to be here. Do you two know each other? I feel like we do. And yet we actually just met at an interview before Christmas, you know, over the airwaves, so to speak. And I already wanted to be friends. In fact, I thought we already were just from reading the book.

I really, this is the highlight of my career. I must say that an astronaut wants to be my friend. Samantha, why the ISS, why the subject? act. Well, you know, I wanted really to write about the Earth more than about space at the beginning. I wanted to write something like a pastoral novel, something that was about the natural world. And I somehow ended up in low Earth orbit, sort of a little bit unwittingly, and thought, well, you know, with the images of the Earth from there, and there's lots of footage that we can enjoy now, us Earthlings, they're just so excited. extraordinary in every way. And they sort of asked me, I think, to re-evaluate my sense of my

own place on the earth. And there was something in the feeling of that, of looking at those images, that was incredibly powerful and a driver to want to write about it. So I thought, well, I wonder if I can write this sort of pastoral novel, but from an extraordinary viewpoint. And once I decided that I wanted to write about the earth from that distance, then I, you know, realized, of course, I need some kind of locus for that. So that ended up being the ISS. And then there was, you know, an enormous amount of research that I had to do to set it from there. But the impetus for the project was really an emotional one, just wanting to capture in words, the extraordinary view of the planet and what I felt when I looked at it.

I want to talk about this exact thing because early on in the book, one of the astronauts laments that it's difficult to put the experience into words. So you write, she finds, she often struggles for things to tell people at home because the small things are too mundane and the rest is too astounding. And there seems to be nothing in between. And I, when I read this, I thought this was funny because I was like, well, that's, of course, exactly what this book does so beautifully is to put it into words. And I'm wondering, Katie, does this ring true to you that it's hard to sort of explain what it's like to be up there? It definitely is, and I think more importantly, each of us has our own experience up there. And I'll say, you know, not always with the skills to express that.

And so, you know, every part of it isn't my experience, but it, for me, actually, it helped me sort of go back to the space station and feel like I was back there. But I feel like Samantha brought up these different points of view for people to try them on. whether they're astronauts who've lived up there or people on earth wondering what it's like to be up there. So she just, I think she lays out some of the possibilities. Samantha, was this part of the challenge of writing the book actually sort of translating this otherworldly, rare experience into words? I mean, yes, but of course I haven't had the experience, albeit that I did do a lot of reading of astronauts' journals and, and the books that they've written.

So I think a lot of that translation was from imagery that I could see online and translating from an emotion in myself that was arising and trying to put that into words, try to sort of create what for me was as much a painting as it was a novel and maybe as much a piece of music. I feel like of all the novels I've written, it's the one that sort of most makes,

contact with the other with other art forms. So I think this was me trying to translate from imagery and from emotion and obviously not from experience because I haven't experienced it myself. So it's it's so interesting to me to know what it's really like. You know, it's something I can never experience. I will never be able to go there. So speaking to Katie is so fascinating to me and it feels like, you know, there's my realm, the book that I've written, which is functioning entirely in the realm of the imagination. And then there's the realm of experience, and I'm interested in how those two things speak to each other. I'm interested in that too. I mean, Katie, did reading Samantha's imagined version lead you to realize or sort of learn anything new about your own

experience? It absolutely did. Samantha brought me back to so many little moments. and touch points, that it really helped me sort of re-experience my life on the space station. And it was everything from, I mean, we wake up in the morning and you always look at the morning messages. And she had some expression like, you know, the sort of greeting from the ground of the morning mail on the computer. And it just was this really delightful way to say it that I really loved. So I just really, you know, there's all sorts of little bookmarks. And I have places where I wrote no, you know, or just an end, right? Where you wrote no.

She said something about, you know, someone steadied themselves. And I just thought, hmm, I don't think I ever studied myself. And it's because in my, the way I think of studying, it's, it has to do with those little toys that like kind of almost fall down and then write themselves. And that it has to do with gravity. whereas I just don't, I mean, since we never quite fall over, I don't think we need studied. And it wasn't that I thought, oh, that's wrong. It's more I thought, how interesting, you know, why doesn't that ring true? It's really interesting to hear you say that.

And when I was writing the book, the thing I was most acutely aware of all the time was that, although I can do my research, ultimately this is an imaginative, project and so I can only bring myself to it and I am so fundamentally and constitutionally not an astronaut you know there's there's no how do you mean I think the jury is out I mean okay I'm not practical I um travel sick me too sometimes see sick anyway are you that's interesting um I am emotionally not terribly robust when it comes to quite sort of overwhelming experiences. I think I would just spend my time in tears. There's a character in the book who is one of the female astronaut's

husbands. And I'm him, basically. He's this sort of guy who lives in a field in the countryside and just imagines himself going into space and going mad and thwarting the mission. And that would be me, I think. So I kept wondering, are my imaginative capacities going to be enough to escape the prism of my own non-astronautness? So it's so, this was really in my mind the whole time I was writing, can I do this? Is this a step too far? Is this a set of characters I really am not equipped to write about? So to know where it does chime and where it doesn't chime is so fascinating to me. Well, I'm looking at just two pages, and I have, I don't know, six things underlined that delighted me, okay? Read them. What are they? Let's see. They're looking at the

typhoon, and Pietro says when he comes to join her, he's joining Nell at the window. They watch it hone in on the Philippines and Taiwan and the coast of Vietnam. And to me, it wasn't exactly what you were talking about there with the typhoon. It was the fact that this is what watching TV together is like up there, is that somebody says, hey, come, come look out the window together. And you had this great ways of saying, you know, as we come across the typhoon, you know, every orbit of 90 minutes, you know, this typhoon that's another 90 minutes bigger. Because, of course, it's growing. And it just delighted me to think, well, you know, the reason it's hard to step away from the window

is because, or fly away from the window, is because everything is changing every orbit. And every time you see it, it's different by definition, different light, different things going on there. And then, let's see, there was all sorts of rules that were being put down about which you're supposed to use the toilet of your country. And so the U.S. people should use the U.S. one. You know, the Russians should use the Russian one. And it really expresses what really happens is that the crew is just going to be one crew. And we're all from the place below and proud of the exact place we come from down there. And you write, you know, on the craft's internal cameras, mission control watches, the crew, in flagrant disregard of these edicts.

And there's no point in trying to make it any different. I have it underlined here. Astronauts and cosmonauts are much like cats, they conclude. Intrepid, cool, and can't be herded. And I'm just now reading the last one. This is pages at 84 and 85. And they're talking about scuba diving, but I think they're also talking about being in. space. And just the depth of the color blue, Nell agrees, just the light, the color, the creatures,

the coral, the sounds, just everything. Pietro agrees, just everything. And so even though they're talking about what they see when they scuba dive, these are two people in space that I think emotionally are expressing, like, where we are, the way we feel, everything from living here, to the earth right outside our window. You know, it's just everything. So I really loved it. Sam, what's it like for you to hear Katie, an astronaut who has lived or who's lived this life, respond to your book in this way?

Oh, wow. It makes me feel quite tearful. It's really magical. And actually, when I was writing the book or when it came out, I think somebody mentioned to me the prospect of sending it to an astronaut or an astronaut reading it. And I thought, oh, God, I hope no astronaut ever reads it. When we come back, we'll find out why Samantha Harvey hoped no astronaut would ever read her book on astronauts. Although I loved writing it, it also felt continually like an active trespass.

So I have to ask them, so I know when I wrote my book, you know, I actually was that I would think, oh, what if other astronauts? read this, well, they think, oh, that's not exactly right. Well, they think, you know, oh, that's too much to say. Or, you know, and I wrote this book with someone else, a co-writer. And she said, Katie, everyone has that hundred people that they hear in their ear. Did you hear us in your ear? Yeah, I did a little bit. I did. And I could sort of, because I felt that while I was writing the book, that although I loved writing it and although I was very committed to it, it also felt continually like an active trespass, that I was writing about something I had no right to write about because it's something I can't ever experience. And that's a funny,

that's a funny thing because I've written, all of my books are about things I've never experienced. That's what I love to do. I don't really like to write autobiographically. So I don't know what that sense of trespass was, except that I suppose astronauts, as a group are fairly formidable. They feel it in the public consciousness. I think that's why it's so amazing to have this personal exchange with you, Katie, because astronauts exist in the public imagination, I think, as almost mythical beings. I think, you know, when we're children, you know, often want to be astronauts

or at least we're very aware of that as some sort of job, but not a real job. anyone could ever have. And I think some of that has carried through. For me, I think I felt that when I was writing the book that, of course, of course you're not mythical beings, but there's something mythical about space travel. There's something in the public imagination there that feels sort of inaccessible. And I think I was picking up on that while I was writing the book. And at the same time trying to use that, you know, trying to exploit that sense of the dreamscape, the otherness of it, the extraordinarilyness, and just to create a kind of suspended narrative. So it feels like a real culmination of everything to be able to speak to you about it.

Well, it's such a special world, but I think that you've done exactly the right thing, and it's maybe one of the reasons that we're here on Science Friday is that we have to make, you know, the impossible seem like it's accessible to everyone. You know, what I love about this book so much and what I love about the work that you do, Katie, is that you're humanizing science. And science isn't always humanized very well, which I personally feel like is a big missed opportunity. Me too. And Sam, I wondered if, you know, now that you've immersed yourself in this astronaut world,

if you might take on another sciencey subject in a future novel or how you think about this intersection. That's a good question. I mean, I tend not to tread the same ground twice with my novels, probably much to my editor's dismay. One of the great joys of this book has been this intersection with the sciences, which is the part of the process that daunted me the most, because I'm evidently not a scientist. but it's been the sort of the way the scientific world has taken it in and been welcoming to it on the whole. People have been incredibly receptive to it, which I've found very sort of generous of spirit in a sense, because you have this imposter coming in, making things up about your field.

I think that that's been received with an incredible amount of graciousness. actually. And that's been really, really gratifying. And I think that these intersections are really important. And I don't know how we make them happen more between the arts and the sciences. And I know they already do happen somewhat, but I think that they really matter. And especially as we're moving now into a sort of a new era of space travel, and it can be quite bewildering, I think, for a layperson or for the public to understand what's going on. I mean, of course, at a surface level they can understand, but what it's like to be in space as a domestic environment,

what it's like to live there, to just clarify, illuminate certain ideas and certain realities around this, I think is really important. So I don't know if I'll ever do something like this again, but certainly having done it this one time has been probably the most expansive experience I've had of publication. Samantha, before we go, you've talked about how this book in some ways is a eulogy to the ISS, which is almost at the end of its life. NASA has plans to decommission it in 2030, and then it will eventually break up in the atmosphere. After having spent so much time with it, will you be sad to see it go?

I'll be really sad to see it go. I think because I have a slightly sort of romanticised idea of everything, I do see the ISS already with a kind of nostalgia of something that has, that belongs to an era of peaceful cooperation between humans. And I, and I see it as this sort of lovely, a kind of time capsule almost, something that's kind of carries the hopes and dreams of a post-Cold War era and I think that we're moving into something quite different now, and the unknownness of that can be unsettling.

So I think that I will feel rather sad when it's gone. I did ask, when Katie and I last spoke, I think I asked you, Katie, if you would feel sad about it's deorbiting and you seem to be more sanguine about it and less romantically involved somehow than I am. So I appreciate, again, that my ideas of it are somewhat couched in a romanticized ideology of it and maybe not in the reality of it and the fact that we need to move on. I do think about it a little differently and that I would just change one word in what you just said that, you know, we have to move on.

We get to move on. And so the ISS, now if we could, we would probably build it differently and less expensive. really, and have it be a more accessible place. So in a way, even though the ISS is going away, certainly your book is a timeless snapshot of different points of view of what it's like to be a human in that special place. That's a really wonderful coda, I think, and I think right there in that amendment from we have to move on to we get to move on is exactly why I'm not an astronaut and you are. I sort of think, oh, well, I guess we have to progress. If we must, then we will.

Whereas I think that mindset that progress is positive, it's beautiful, it can be good. It's not always good, but it can be good, is very much part of this wonderful curiosity that it seems to be common among all astronauts and this willingness to embrace the new, which I think I unfortunately lack. I think you understood a lot. Thank you. I think that's the perfect place to leave it. I have so enjoyed this conversation.

Thank you both for taking the time to talk to us today. Well, thanks so much. It takes me back, and I really appreciate both of you for your role in doing that. Yeah, thank you so much to you both. Samantha Harvey is author of the Booker Prize-winning novel, Orbital. And Katie Coleman is a former NASA astronaut and author of the book, Sharing Space, an astronaut's Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change. And that is about all we have time for.

Lots of folks helped make this show happen, including... Rasha Eredi. Sandy Roberts. Shoshana Buxbaum. Danielle Johnson. I'm Flora Lichten. Thanks for listening.