Samantha Harvey’s Orbital has . What the narrative skillfully and unflinchingly lays bare is the devastating human cost of aviation’s relentless pursuit of efficiency, starkly juxtaposed against the pressing imperative to mitigate the devastating impacts of climate-related calamities.
As a catastrophic storm brews across south-east Asia, threatening lives and livelihoods, six international space travelers – three Americans, two Russians, and one Canadian – orbit our planet at an altitude of approximately 250 miles from the Worldwide House Station. As they adhere to a monotonous cycle of uninspiring sustenance and scientific experimentation, the stark contrast with the majestic Earth stands out – a celestial body that harmoniously oscillates between the darkness of night and the radiance of day, its luminescence transcending geographical boundaries, rendering borders obsolete.
As people’s understanding of what constitutes a home evolved, so too did the concept of orbital dynamics.
A peculiar film, “Harvey’s Six,” offers a thought-provoking glimpse into a time when the world was on lockdown, with our homes transformed into prisons and global pandemics testing the limits of international cooperation as we struggled to comprehend the far-reaching consequences of a virus that knew no borders.
From a vantage point on the World Wide House Station, cityscapes materialize as clusters of artificial light on the edge of the Earth’s darkness, illuminated only by the faint glow of urban centers. Rivers are nonsensical scores on the earth, akin to tangled threads of fallen hair, their meandering paths defying comprehension. Meanwhile, time becomes distorted, as if the opposite side of the world were mere minutes away, dissolving all boundaries between reality and fantasy.
The photograph shows Apollo 11 orbiting the Moon before its successful re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, taken by Michael Collins, one of the mission’s astronauts. Picture: NASA
Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov reminisces about the historic moment when US astronaut Michael Collins, part of the Apollo 11 crew, departed from the lunar surface in 1969, as the Earth gleamed in the distance beyond.
While he dismisses the notion that Russian literature must be infused with certain themes, he is fascinated by the emotional resonance of those individuals captured in the photograph. Isn’t Collins the sole individual who remains entirely absent from this context? Is the solitary figure of the gardener the sole constant in our lives?
Shaun received a postcard featuring the work of Spanish painter Diego Velázquez, sent by his wife. The portrayal’s sophisticated structure has been criticized for blurring the line between the subject and its context, making it challenging to pinpoint the topic. Is it the viewer? The royal baby? King Philip IV and his wife, Queen Mariana of Austria, are depicted on the wall.
As words spill onto the postcard, Shaun’s partner pens a warm welcome: “Enter the intricate maze of human existence, where reflections converge and uncertainty abounds.”
Italian astronaut Pietro effortlessly resolves the intellectual puzzle by identifying the subject matter of the painting as the dog beside the baby. That which alone stands out as genuine, untainted by frivolity or self-absorption.
Individuals, in Shaun’s opinion, are hardly remarkable entities.
As we gaze at our own reflections, pondering what sets us apart from canines, this seemingly arbitrary element in the portrait serves as a poignant reminder that our distinctions are ultimately inconsequential.
We are, in fact, additional animals fighting for our very survival.
As the Earth orbits the sun at a tilt of nearly 23.5 degrees, it takes approximately 16 orbits for the same landmasses to rotate into view from an astronaut’s vantage point, their familiarity transformed by distance and velocity.
The pyramids, those majestic New Zealand fjords, and vast expanses of shifting dunes – all reduced to mere microscopy, akin to capturing the intricacies of a single cardiac cell in a Petri dish.
Las Meninas by Diego Velazquez.
Prado, CC BY-ND
Japanese astronaut Chie’s research laboratory mice, a sensitive indicator species in her ambitious endeavour, have finally been trained to navigate and even barter in microgravity within the confines of their shoebox module, much like tiny flying carpets. As British astronaut Nell ventures onto the vast expanse of the space station during her spacewalk, she gazes out at the seemingly endless universe, where Earth is just a distant memory, and her home feels eerily close.
The astronauts’ detachment from Earth often yields a stronger emotional bond with their space-faring vessels. As Harvey’s vivid descriptions unfold, the tension simmers between his deep affection for the planet he regards as “mom” and his unrelenting drive to venture forth, forever bound by the desire to leave and explore.
Shaun ponders the futility of venturing into space, questioning the necessity of leaving a thriving Earth behind, wondering why they’re expending resources on a destination that’s already redundant. Later, his frustration grows as he’s forced to navigate the constraints of orbiting 250 miles above the planet’s surface. The moon, in his opinion, marks the starting point.
Harvey’s novel masterfully illuminates the devastating personal cost of a hastily planned evacuation in response to an impending local weather catastrophe, laying bare the emotional toll on those affected by this crisis. The fate of humanity’s future, as perceived by Shaun to Pietro, seems to be penned with the golden quills of wealthy moguls.
As an unprecedented climate crisis looms over the planet, six astronauts and cosmonauts are meticulously chronicling their own bodily processes, collecting “blood, urine, faecal, and saliva samples” and tracking “heart rates, blood pressure, and sleep patterns” to fulfill a grand ambition: to understand what it means to be alive beyond Earth’s boundaries.
Despite its slender page count of 135, Harvey’s economical writing somehow distills an entire cosmos of significance into a remarkably concise and potent work. As she navigates the intersection of contemporary anxieties and the vast expanse of human history, from Velázquez’s 17th-century masterpiece Las Meninas to the curated spectacle of astronauts carefully crafted, packaged, and primed for mass consumption by Hollywood, science fiction, and Disney’s Odyssey.
As Harvey observes, “They’re individuals, possessed of a divine perspective that is both their greatest strength and most significant liability.”
In a cinematic departure from Hollywood’s typical fare, I was struck by the eerie echoes of John Carpenter’s sci-fi classic where a trio of space-faring explorers, stuck in an endless quest to eradicate volatile celestial bodies, obsess over the dwindling supply of toilet paper as much as their very existence. As the once-majestic thrill of orbital achievement gives way to the crushing weight of entropy, even the most daring ventures are beset by the creeping sense of decay’s relentless march. The module appears to be in disrepair; a noticeable fissure has emerged.
What’s happening to the International Space Station? As Harvey penned his magnum opus, he crafted a narrative that defied the conventional boundaries of our known world. The promise of this endeavour lies in its potential to educate us on perceiving the Earth from a novel perspective, one that currently eludes us.
