1.

Soyuz TMA-15M, 11 June 2015

We are a ball of fire in dizzying descent towards the planet, an incandescent wound in the thin atmosphere that envelops the Earth. We’re slicing through the air at stupendous speed, air that gets so hot it becomes plasma. We are a falling star: if it were night, someone, somewhere would be wishing on us.

The little window on my left begins to darken on the outside, while shades of fiery orange dance around us. We’re shrouded in ionized molecules of air, and they are blocking radio communication: just before we rejoin the Earthlings, our virtual umbilical cord, which has kept us connected to Mission Control in Moscow, is severed. It’s almost a new birth: in a few minutes we’ll emerge from the plasma, the parachute will open, and we’ll make contact with the search and rescue helicopters of the Russian military already airborne over the Kazakh steppe. If everything goes to plan, we’ll be reborn as Earthlings.

For 200 days, we’ve been extraterrestrial humans, orbiting at an altitude of 400 kilometres aboard the International Space Station. We’ve flown over every part of the Earth except the extreme north and south of the planet, every sea, every mountain and desert, every city and every port. We’ve witnessed a perpetually renewing, silent spectacle, all of it played out for billions of years before we humans laid eyes on it. As residents and guardians of humanity’s outpost in space, we’ve inhabited weightless bodies and held weightless objects. We’ve felt the liberating and invigorating power of dreams come true, along with the responsibility of deserving, every day, a privilege reserved for few: representing humanity in space, the final frontier.

Only three hours ago we released the hooks that anchored us to the Space Station. Only half an hour ago we switched on the engine of our small Soyuz spaceship, slowing its unrelenting race around the planet. Just a bit, but enough to deliver us to the embrace of the atmosphere, which is now, little by little, relieving us of our extraordinary speed. The effect of this deceleration presses us into our seats: we’re about to reach a first peak of 3.6 Gs, or 3.6 times our normal weight. Nothing out of the ordinary when we experienced it in the centrifuge on Earth, but fierce pressure after 200 days of absolute lightness.

My attention is split between my breathing, which is becoming increasingly difficult, and the display in front of me, which shows the parameters of our re-entry into the atmosphere. Everything is working perfectly: the on-board computer is automatically configuring a trajectory towards a location in the sky 10 kilometres over Kazakhstan, where the parachute will open. The voice of our commander comes through my earphones, calm and clear despite the pressure on his throat. He is making a report on the descent for the record: we’re close to the nominal trajectory, and our deceleration has reached a second peak of 4.1 Gs and is now falling. No one can hear us right now, cocooned as we are in plasma, but already, many eyes are trained on the moment of our arrival.

The Astrey crew is coming home. We are the ones falling from the sky.