Orbital

Orbital is the story of six astronauts on a space station revolving around the earth at a speed of thousands of miles per hour – completing sixteen rounds of earth in twenty-four hours – and thus witnessing sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets in twenty-four hours. The astronauts are from different countries, and the book captures their mundane lives and their memory of earth and how they see planet earth from space – physically, emotionally, and philosophically.

It takes a couple of chapters to make sense of the setting and understand its rhythm. But once readers can visualise the astronauts on the space station and the way they are circling Earth, the book begins to grow on you. It is more philosophical than a conventional space or sci-fi novel.

The author narrates parts of the story through the astronauts — how they remember Earth, their families, and their loved ones who are so far away from them. At other moments, she steps in as the narrator and offers readers a philosophical commentary on the universe, Earth, human existence, and much more.

This book needs to be read slowly, absorbing the words, the thought behind the words. It makes the reader pause and think about our actions and what we have done to earth in the last 400-500 years in the name of progress – and poses some ethical question what is the limit? When will we stop?

Can humans not find peace with one another? With the earth? It’s not a fond wish but a fretful demand. Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ransacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?

Looking from the space the earth is one unit for the astronauts. Back on the earth they may be divided by borders, flags and by countries but in the space, they are all one – they all belong to earth. Here in space the boundaries vanish. The author also ponders on the self-importance of humans in the grand scheme of things and believes that our sense of superiority is misplaced, because from space, human conflicts, ambitions, borders, and achievements appear very small against the vastness of Earth and the universe.

The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

Alongside its philosophical reflections, Orbital also gives readers a glimpse of how astronauts live on a space station: how they receive supplies such as food and clothes, how waste is sent back and burned up before reaching Earth, and how spacewalks are carried out when something needs to be installed or repaired outside the station.

You will also get to know the problem of space debris — the “tens of thousands of remnants of jettisoned or exploded satellites and launch-vehicle stages and craft” left behind in orbit. This becomes another reminder of the damage human beings leave wherever they go. As the author writes, “Wherever mankind goes it leaves some kind of destruction behind it, perhaps the nature of all life, to do this.”