As Orbit 7 carries the station north toward Central America, morning races up behind the Terminator and the sun rises for the seventh time that day, making the craft seem like a burning bullet. Nell watches the light arrive before it reaches Earth and feels how space looks different after leaving the station.

Nell recalls her spacewalk the week before: the initial terror of “falling” when she released the hatch, the instruction not to look down, and her inability to resist seeing Earth tumbling beneath her. She remembers focusing on her gloved hands and on Pietro ahead of her, moving in profound darkness beside the floating spectrometer they meant to install.

She recounts the demands of the EVA—checking tethers, using handrails, protecting equipment, wrestling with the suit’s mass, and learning not to fight space’s indifferent force but adapt to it. Time became meaningless across hours of repairs, photographing, and picking debris from orbit, while day and dusk and night cycled repeatedly: stars emerged, continents and deserts passed, and the thin mauve rim of Earth brought a gut-pain of elation. In that moment, the station felt like home, while space’s “nothingness” paradoxically consoled her, even stirring a desire to drift farther out as her tether reeled away.

Afterwards, when the crew spoke about their spacewalks, they described a sense of de9je0 vu; Roman suggested it might be like womb-memory, “being not yet born.” Watching Earth now—Cuba pink with morning, the Caribbean’s turquoise shallows—Nell thinks about how exposed a person is out there: only a suit, coolant, a rope, and a life, with continents hidden beneath a boot or a gloved hand.

The astronauts’ relationship to the view changes over time. They first fixate on night lights and can point out homes and cities, noticing that the only stark man-made border visible is the trail of lights between Pakistan and India; then they come to love the daytime planet’s borderless simplicity and animal-like “breathing.” Training prepared them for dissonance—rapture and despair at a seamless globe that shows no nations even though they know war and division persist.

Eventually their awe turns into a fervent need to protect Earth, paired with uncertainty about what action is possible from their distance. Many avoid the news because it feels like an insulting, exhausting noise against the planet’s single “clear note,” choosing instead neutral distractions like music, comedy, or sport. Then a shift: they recognize politics is not merely pantomime but a force that visibly shapes the planet itself—algal blooms, melting glaciers, fires, floods, mining ponds, altered coasts—everywhere marked by human choices. From orbit they perceive “the politics of want,” a planetary reshaping driven by the urge for more, and they acknowledge they are part of it too.