Back to Earth

[LunaSea]

Review of the new book-
Back to Earth: What Life in Space Taught Me About Our Home Planet—And Our Mission to Protect It
by Nicole Stott
Seal Press, 2021
hardcover, 304 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-1-5416-7504-9

Most people in the space industry have heard of the Overview Effect, the change in perspective about the Earth that comes from seeing it from space. It got renewed attention earlier this month when William Shatner went on a Blue Origin suborbital spaceflight, and talked about the experience for what seemed like longer than the flight itself (see “Black ugliness and the covering of blue: William Shatner’s suborbital flight to ‘death’”, The Space Review, October 18, 2021). The topic is likely to come up among some of the astronaut panels at this week’s International Astronautical Congress in Dubai as well.

It can be difficult, though, for those of us who have not been to space to appreciate the experience. Even astronauts struggle to put it into words. “No picture, no video, and no conversation with others who had flown before could have prepared me for what I saw with my own eyes and felt with my own soul,” writes former NASA astronaut Nicole Stott of the first time she saw the Earth from orbit in the introduction of her new book Back to Earth. She likens it to a light bulb “spattered with all of the colors we know to Earth to be” that is almost too bright to look at. “All the Earth’s colors glowed with an iridescence and translucence I’d never seen before.”


That experience made her appreciate something she considered simple and profound: we live on a planet, “and the only border that matters is the thin blue line of atmosphere that protects us all.” That becomes the jumping-off point for her book, which used her spaceflight and other life experiences to illustrate the importance of taking care of the Earth—of being a crewmember of “Spaceship Earth” just as she was a crewmember of the International Space Station.

More-
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4268/1

[Drum]

1. Kick for balance and visibility!

[Uncle Joe]

2. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread LunaSea.

[lastlib]

3. Another Kick for visibility.

I was young enough when Apollo 8 first brought us the "Earthrise" photo from the moon that it helped shape me into what I am now. Seeing how artificial human borders are from that perspective has had me thinking my entire life about why we can't see all others as brothers & sisters.