On Orbit 15 the spacecraft sails north-east in darkness from the Antarctic ice shelf while everyone sleeps. Below, the Indian Ocean is almost indistinguishable except for a faint orange atmospheric line and the faithful moon, and the stars seem to fizz upward as if the Earth were sealed under glass.

Lightning pulses over storm systems as the equator nears, then dawn arrives like a wave, turning the remnants of a wrecked typhoon into violet and peach cloud peaks. In sudden daylight the station passes the Maldives, Sri Lanka, India’s tip, and the Bay of Bengal, then over Bangladesh and toward the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau, where the mountains look like hoar frost and frozen lakes gleam like sapphires.

The orbit continues across China’s mountains and desert, up past Japan and Russian islands, and over the Bering Sea toward Alaska and Canada, where land looks fractured into random pieces. From this height the crew’s world feels radically connected—continents run into each other, and even long ocean stretches feel like part of a seamless, dreamlike whole.

Night returns abruptly as the terminator “swipes” daylight away and the stars burst out; in their sleep the crew feel the weight of it and sink deeper. Over South America, lightning zaps the coast and vast clouds trail the sea; in the darkest interior, patchworks of orange reveal rainforest burning up to the Andes, and the orbit crosses a continent on fire toward Buenos Aires and the Antarctic Circle.

The craft glides across the South Atlantic to Africa, where city lights appear as discreet gold heaps amid lightning, then tracks over the Gulf of Aden and the Middle East. Another sunrise breaks, and the text lingers on the crew’s repetitive-yet-new wonder at each dawn and on the stark reality that to go home they must burn back through the atmosphere to Kazakhstan. Still asleep, they complete the day’s fifteenth orbit, with the Himalayas and Russia sliding beneath as the station rounds near the Arctic Circle and heads toward a long Pacific passage.