Page 124 of Atmosphere

On the fifth day, notlong before the end of the mission, Joan felt well enough to look out the window.

As she stared ahead, at the big, bright, deep blue of the oceans of Earth, she took a full breath for the first time in days.

There it was.

Earth.

Daytime over the Pacific Ocean.

She looked at the western coast of the United States—all green and fading brown, cloud patterns across it in the starkest white. She could spot Baja California, but she could not tell where the border between the United States and Mexico was for certain. She could not see countries, with firm lines and borders. She saw only landmasses, undivided.

It was so funny to her, in that moment, to think that only American-trained space explorers were called “astronauts.” That if you were trained in the Soviet Union you were a “cosmonaut.” How utterly silly to make that distinction, when Russia kissed North America the way it did.

She thought back toSputnik 1.

She’d been seven years old, looking up at the night sky with her father, when she had seen the satellite overhead in her binoculars. It rocked something in her, that humans had sent something up into the sky. That week, on the news, she kept hearing that “the Russians” put a satellite in space and that America must catch up.

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.

Humanshad figured out how to put a satellite up there.

Humanshad 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’sVitruvian 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.

“It’s so small,” Harrison said, having just floated up beside her.

Joan nodded. “It’s a midsize planet orbiting a midsize star in a galaxy of a hundred billion stars. In a universe of one hundred billion galaxies.”

“With almost five billion people on the planet,” Harrison said.

Joan nodded.

“Hard to believe any one person has any significance,” he said. “I knew that before, but I neverknewit, until now. Human life is…meaningless.”

Joan looked at him.

How was it that two people, right next to each other, given the rarest of perspectives, could draw two totally opposite conclusions?

When Joan looked back at the Earth, she was overwhelmed with her own life’s meaning—and the fact that the only meaning itcouldhave was the meaning she gave it.

Joan studied the thin blue, hazy circle that surrounded the Earth. The atmosphere was so delicate, nearly inconsequential. But it was the very thing keeping everyone she loved alive.

Intelligent life was her meaning.

People were her meaning.

Frances and Vanessa.

Harrison swam away, but Joan stayed at the window and tried to spot Dallas. She thought of Frances, and what time it was there, andwhether she was with her friends or playing field hockey. She thought of Vanessa, in Houston, at JSC, doing her own flight preparations.

---