The day of my first launch was a month after I turned eighteen, in early spring. It was cold and damp, and melting snow covered the ground. When I got to the launch pad I was given my papers and told to wait. I was assigned to be an engineer on the Sundew, a cargo station orbiting Earth that distributed supplies to the moon, Mars, and the Pink Planet. As good a post as I could hope for. NSP maintained several cargo stations in orbit, as well as small satellite and research outposts on the moon, Mars, and the Pink Planet, but that was it. The Explorer program had never been revived.
The rest of my crew were already in orbit. Three times I’d requested a post with the only woman station commander in orbit, Carla’s sister and my uncle’s former student, Amelia Silva. And three times I’d been slated to serve at another post. Then at the last minute my assignment was changed, and not only Amelia’s name but also Simon’s was listed at the top of my paperwork.
I suited up for the trip to the Sundew in a mobile office. Up until that moment I felt fine. Candidate Group had made me stronger. The physical training hardened my body, built me up in some places, and whittled me down in others. My arm and leg muscles grew round; I lost the soft spots on my stomach and thighs. I knew how to do things now—run a mile in seven minutes, do five pull-ups without stopping, hold my breath under water longer than anyone else in my year—and I could count on my body to do them. I also knew things, lots of things. About advanced astrophysics, space materials science, robotics. I’d been trained in survival skills and basic emergency medicine. I knew how to tread water for hours, set a broken bone, stitch up a wound.
But when I saw my suit on the wall—small and shrunken looking on its hook—I hung back. In my uncle’s books astronauts wore suits that glowed white against the flat black of open space; they were the brightest things on the page. In the videos I’d watched of astronauts floating in zero gravity, they took up the whole screen, and their arms and legs drifted like leaves on the surface of water. This was what I’d been waiting for my whole life, but now that it was here, I wasn’t thinking of the astronauts themselves, strong and full of all the things they knew. I was thinking of the deep and endless expanse they floated in. My hands shook as I took the suit from the wall. I steadied myself, stepped backward into the suit, pulled the neck ring down over my head, and worked my hands through the arms. Then I straightened my ponytail and put my helmet on. I didn’t need to be wearing my helmet, not yet, but I wanted to check the pop and suck of its seal.
It was just me, the pilot, and his second-in-command, and we walked, bowlegged and slow, the few yards to an open cage elevator. There was a partitioned area for relatives and friends to say goodbye to crew members who were going into orbit for months at a time. I barely glanced at it. But Lion was there; he was waving at me. He stood wearing a puffy blue coat (he was a trainer in the NSP neutral buoyancy tanks now). I hadn’t seen him in months. I swallowed hard and waved back.
When I moved up to Candidate Group I didn’t see Carla and Lion and Nico as much. We would talk when we ran into one another in the yard or at the dive pool. For a while Lion and I lifted weights on Saturday mornings. But we didn’t have classes together, or Materials lab, and it wasn’t the same.
The elevator went up. I held my helmet in my hands and the wind whipped and pulled at my hair. Lion was still standing in the same spot. He put his hood up against the wind. He smiled and kept waving. The elevator rose higher and soon I couldn’t see his face anymore, just the spot of blue that was his coat.
At the top the wind was terrific and I held on to the platform as it buffeted my body. The pilot secured the Velcro on my suit, tightening it at my back, elbows, ankles, and wrists, and we crossed a swing arm toward the open hatch of the capsule. The pilot and second-in-command entered first and I followed. Dark and cramped and crammed with supplies, there was only enough space for the three of us to wedge ourselves into our molded plastic seats. I had an advantage being so small, but even still it was a tight squeeze in my suit. I strapped myself in and felt the walls above my head and against my left elbow; I could move only my right arm freely.
The hatch door closed. Minus fifty-four minutes was announced. I grabbed at my checklist but couldn’t reach it. I strained against my chest belt and was just able to pull the checklist free. The pilot and his second went through their own lists and called things out to each other in a mix of English and Japanese. The compartment began to warm and I started to sweat. Oxygen was flowing but it didn’t feel like it. The air was hot and still. I tried to concentrate on my tasks, but I was intensely aware of the walls pressing against my arms and legs, the lack of air. My eyes strayed to the low ceiling, to the sealed hatch door.
When the high-pitched whine of the fuel and oxidizer turbo pumps filled the small space I felt relief. Ten minutes to launch. I completed the tasks on my list, put on my helmet, locked it, and checked its seal. At two minutes to launch the whine grew. Even with my helmet to dampen the sound. I felt it vibrating through my chest, my jaw.
One minute to launch. Then, ignition. The capsule began to shake; my breath grew hot inside my helmet. Then a thundering came from below, a pent-up roar. The rocket swayed to the left, to the right, as if it would tip over. But it was all right. I’d read about it. My breath got hotter and hotter. We were tipping more and more.
Then—a lift, the loss of supports. A two-second delay—and a terrible spring into the air, like a crouching animal unchained. My body slammed against my seat, my visor fogged, and we were airborne. The second-stage rockets fired, and I was lifted up, my stomach and breasts straining against my harness as we separated from the rocket.
And then—a sudden quiet. The compartment cooled. My body was light. Out the porthole was an expanse of deep velvety black. The rocket’s white body slowly fell away, and it was the most singular thing I’d ever seen. We began our first orbit and the pilot deployed the solar arrays and antennae. Things floated through the compartment—dust, slips of fabric, a few bolts. I watched their uneven trajectories, the unexpected arcs they made. My head felt full, my eyeballs huge. But my limbs were like air, like dust.
The pilot floated by. He’d taken off his helmet and he gestured for me to do the same. His face was red—zero gravity had pushed all the blood into his head. He started calling out systems checks to mission control. I took off my helmet and the air was cold on my face. I unstrapped myself, held on to my seat with my hands, and hovered just above it. Then I let go and propelled myself like a fish across the compartment.
The Earth’s curved edge was hard and deep blue through the porthole. I remembered my uncle’s globe, a plaster sphere painted blue and brown and written all over with small script, held by an arc of metal engraved with the sun and moon and planets. One time he set the globe on the floor and spun it, and we climbed on top of his desk to watch. Its oceans and continents blurred, turning from hard to soft before our eyes.
This is what it’s like when you’re in orbit, my uncle said. All the world moves fast underneath you, and you feel like you’re a thousand feet tall.
Standing there with him, imagining myself in the kind of spacesuit I now wore, I did feel a thousand feet tall. But this wasn’t like that at all. There was nothing soft about the ball of blue and white in the porthole, no matter how quickly its stretches of land and sea raced past. I felt the planet’s size and force. It seemed to press against the darkness around it, against the porthole itself. Like it would keep pressing until it pushed the capsule out of orbit and sent us flying through open space.
I turned away from the porthole and my hands floated, my body drifted. The entry hatch was near my feet now, the seats at my head. I was upside down but felt I was right side up. My eyes swam around the room. I couldn’t seem to find a place for them to rest. Nausea moved over me, a hot and cold wave.
I climbed back to my seat and strapped myself in. My stomach calmed a little, but I still felt…what? Untethered. Adrift. More like a speck of dust than a person. I thought of my uncle and all the things he knew about the history of our universe, the history of space travel. About the machines that made living in space possible. But he’d never left Earth. As of this moment I’d gone farther into space than he had.