‘Orbital’ Imagines The Inner Lives Of Astronauts On The ISS

FLORA LICHTMAN: This is Science Friday. I’m Flora Lichtman. 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 Cady Coleman. Cady spent almost six months on the International Space Station and is an author herself. She’s joining us from New England Public Media in Amherst, Massachusetts. I am so thrilled to have you both on to talk about this book and life in space. Welcome to Science Friday.

SAMANTHA HARVEY: Hi. Hi, Flora. Hi, Cady.

CADY COLEMAN: It’s so nice to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you two know each other?

CADY COLEMAN: I feel like we do. And yet we actually just met at an interview before Christmas 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.

[LAUGHTER]

SAMANTHA HARVEY: I really– this is the highlight of my career, I must say, that an astronaut wants to be my friend.

[LAUGHTER]

FLORA LICHTMAN: Samantha, why the ISS? Why this subject?

SAMANTHA HARVEY: Well, 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 a little bit unwittingly and thought, well, 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 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, from 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 realized, of course, I need some kind of locus for that. So that ended up being the ISS. And then there was 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: 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 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, Cady, does this ring true to you, that it’s hard to sort of explain what it’s like to be up there?

CADY COLEMAN: It definitely is. And I think more importantly, each of us has our own experience up there. And I’ll say, not always with the skills to express that. And so every part of it isn’t my experience. But for me, actually, it helped me 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 I think she lays out some of the possibilities.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Samantha, was this part of the challenge of writing the book, actually sort of translating this otherworldly, rare experience into words?

SAMANTHA HARVEY: 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 the books that they’ve written. So I think a lot of that translation was from imagery that I could see online. So speaking to Cady is so fascinating to me. And it feels like 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I’m interested in that, too. I mean, Cady, did reading Samantha’s imagined version lead you to realize or learn anything new about your own experience?

CADY COLEMAN: It absolutely did. And I think 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 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– there’s all sorts of little bookmarks. And I have places where I wrote, no, or just an “N,” right?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Really?

SAMANTHA HARVEY: 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. There’s–

CADY COLEMAN: I don’t know, Sam.

FLORA LICHTMAN: How do you mean?

CADY COLEMAN: I think that jury is out.

[LAUGHTER]

SAMANTHA HARVEY: I mean, OK, I’m not practical. I am travel sick.

CADY COLEMAN: Me too, sometimes. Seasick, anyway.

SAMANTHA HARVEY: Are you? That’s interesting. 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 astronauts’ 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-astronaut-ness? So again, 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.

CADY COLEMAN: Well, I’m looking at just two pages and I have, I don’t know, six things underlined that delighted me, OK?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Read them. What are they?

CADY COLEMAN: Let’s see. This is pages 84 to 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 where we are, the way we feel, everything from living here to the Earth right outside our window. It’s just everything. So I really loved it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Sam, what’s it like for you to hear Cady, an astronaut who’s lived this life, respond to your book in this way?

SAMANTHA HARVEY: Oh, well, 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.

[LAUGHTER]

CADY COLEMAN: So I have to ask, Sam. So I know when I wrote my book, I actually was– I would think, oh, what if other astronauts read this? Will they think, oh, that’s not exactly right? Will they think, oh, that’s too much to say? And I wrote this book with someone else, a co-writer, and she said, Cady, everyone has that 100 people that they hear in their ear. Did you hear us in your ear?

SAMANTHA HARVEY: 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 act of 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 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.

[LAUGHTER]

They feel it in the public consciousness. I think that’s why it’s so amazing to have this personal exchange with you, Cady, because astronauts exist in the public imagination, I think, as almost mythical beings. I think when we’re children, you 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 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, trying to exploit that sense of the dreamscape, the otherness of it, the extraordinariness, and 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.

CADY COLEMAN: 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 the Impossible seem like it’s accessible to everyone.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What I love about this book so much, and what I love about the work that you do, Cady, is that you’re humanizing science. And science isn’t always humanized very well, which I personally feel like is a big missed opportunity.

CADY COLEMAN: Me too.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And Sam, I wondered if, now that you’ve immersed yourself in this astronaut world, if you might take on another science-y subject in a future novel, or how you think about this intersection?

SAMANTHA HARVEY: Hmm, that’s a good question. I mean, I tend not to tread the same ground twice with my novels, probably much to my editors’ dismay. [LAUGHS] 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 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 and making things up about your field. And–

[LAUGHTER]

–I think that that’s been received with an incredible amount of graciousness, actually. And 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.

FLORA LICHTMAN: 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?

SAMANTHA HARVEY: I’ll be really sad to see it go. I think because I have a slightly sort of romanticized idea of everything, I do see the ISS already with a kind of nostalgia of something that belongs to an era of peaceful cooperation between humans. And I see it as this sort of lovely– a kind of time capsule, almost, something that 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. When Cady and I last spoke, I think I asked you, Cady, if you would feel sad about its de-orbiting. 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.

CADY COLEMAN: I do think about it a little differently, in that I would just change a word in what you just said, that 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 expensively, really, and have it be a more accessible place. So in a way, even though the ISS is going away, your book is a timeless snapshot of different points of view of what it’s like to be a human in that special place.

SAMANTHA HARVEY: Hmm, 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.

[LAUGHTER]

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 a part of this wonderful curiosity that seems to be common among all astronauts, and this willingness to embrace the new, which I think I unfortunately lack. [LAUGHS]

CADY COLEMAN: I think you understood a lot.

SAMANTHA HARVEY: Thank you.

FLORA LICHTMAN: 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.

CADY COLEMAN: Well, thanks so much. It takes me back, and I really appreciate both of you for your role in doing that.

SAMANTHA HARVEY: Yeah, thank you so much to you both.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Samantha Harvey is author of the Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital, and Cady Coleman is a former NASA astronaut and author of the book Sharing Space– An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change. If you, like me, could listen to this conversation between Cady and Samantha forever, we will put an extended cut on the Science Friday podcast on Tuesday. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

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