Anton recalls two near-identical dreams from a fortnight earlier, prompted by the new American Moon mission. He dreams through Michael Collins’s famous Apollo-era photograph and fixates on the claim that everyone is “in” the image except the photographer, concluding instead that the only deducible human presence is Collins himself. The thought needles Anton’s national pride and brings back his father’s fabled stories of Russian Moon landings—stories that made Anton promise his wife he would someday become the first Russian on the Moon.

At lunch, Nell and Shaun circle questions they usually avoid: belief, motive, and what drew them into space. Shaun admits the first Moon landing video repelled him because of the hunger and lack he saw in his father and uncle, turning astronauts into projections of frustrated fantasies. Nell answers that Challenger, not Apollo, made spaceflight real to her; she confesses she became obsessed with the seven dead astronauts, keeping their pictures and lighting candles on their birthdays for years, haunted by how quickly everything can vanish.

The conversation leaves Shaun briefly seized by the absurdity and terror of living “four inches of titanium away” from annihilation, before his thoughts shift to the four colleagues heading to the Moon and to his wife’s grim attempt at comfort about orbiting fragments. Elsewhere on the station, Chie works the mouse experiment: untreated mice visibly waste away, injected mice hold up better, and genetically modified mice act bold. Handling them, she apologizes for their doomed fate and steels herself with stoicism while grieving that she will miss her mother’s bone-picking ceremony, hoping her uncle will find a fragment she can keep.

Pietro eats a joyless packet meal and replays an earlier conversation with his teenage daughter about whether progress is beautiful. Listening to Moon-mission coverage, he recognizes both the mythic branding and the species’ hubris, yet also the private, pervasive euphoria he feels in orbit’s smallest routines. Roman tries to raise someone on the packet radio over the emptiness of Australia and thinks of Sergei Krikalev, stranded in space when the USSR collapsed, who relied on radio voices to learn what was happening below.

Anton tends wheat in the lab and stares into the “staggering blackness,” recalling Collins’s phrase for the unknown beyond. Shaun, through ground crews, finally trades understated check-ins with his astronaut friends en route to the Moon, admitting he both wants the journey and cannot bear being farther from his wife. As the station passes Andes snow, Amazon fires, and deepening night, Roman keeps calling into static—until a voice finally struggles back and answers.