by Jeff Pollard
But Kingsley isn't thinking about any of that, instead, keeping his breathing slow and deep, trying to keep as calm as possible. The CanadaArm tugs on him slowly and the airlock door moves away. It takes ten seconds for him to reach the airlock door, then he slips through the doorway and finds himself looking at the bottom of the station's exterior. The top of the station is in sunlight and the bottom is in shade. However it isn't dark as it is lit by Earth-shine. Kingsley can feel the workings of the mechanical arm vibrating through his suit. It comes to a stop just a ways outside the station, with K facing up. Beyond the station he just sees black space, no stars are visible. It's the result of an effect that has led to many conspiracy theorists pointing out that there are no stars in pictures from the lunar surface. It's quite difficult to see stars when there are bright things in your field of view. If you shade your eyes and concentrate on a patch of black space, the stars will come out, but when you have a bright space station in front of you, you won't see the stars behind it. A couple of modules over, the large solar array, mounted to the perpendicular truss, follows the sun. K sees the reflective gold backing of the solar panels. The sun-facing side is a dark blue-black, and behind the solar cells is this gold film which reflect the light back through the solar cells.
“How are we doing?” Michael asks on the radio.
“Doing great,” K says. “Could you maneuver me away from the station and point me toward the Earth.”
“Sure thing.”
Kingsley lowers his golden visor to protect him from the sun. The mechanical arm tugs on K once more, lowering him further from the station, then moving off to one side and out from under the shading of the station's modules. On a bright day on Earth, the sunlight can be quite searing, but that sunlight has traveled through quite a bit of hazy atmosphere before reaching you. In space, there's nothing between you and the sun and it appears quite a bit brighter. The sun also loses its yellow color when viewed without the interference of an atmosphere, instead a stark white. K looks up at the sun through his visor. The arm pauses, then it begins rotating from a different joint and Kingsley's view pans to his right, crossing the horizon and then stopping with him facing straight down, giving him an unobstructed view of Earth.
Seeing the Earth from space has an effect on the psyche. It's not space dementia or extreme isolation or alienation like space-horror films might try to lead you to believe. There is something about being outside of the Earth and being able to look back on the home of humanity, on all of civilization spinning away silently beneath you that makes you viscerally feel what is only intellectual to most. Astronauts call it “The Overview Effect.” It's not a coincidence that the first major pushes for environmentalism arose after we were first able to take pictures of the Earth from afar. You might imagine that Apollo astronauts, most of whom were fighter jocks from the Air Force or Navy, wouldn't exactly be the most philosophical of people, but rather cold engineers or throttle-jockeys that just care about being the first or the best or the fastest, and yet this population of crew-cut sporting military men went to the Moon and then looked back and discovered the Earth. Some of the most regimented, orderly, military men were the very ones coming back and talking about the Earth and human-kind like long-haired philosophers. Living creatures just aren't evolved to handle the psychological impact of leaving their home planet behind, and they are left with an impression that human squabbles are petty, the Earth a fragile space-ship floating through the blackness of space, vulnerable, quiet, precious. From the ground the atmosphere seems infinite, but from space that same atmosphere is nothing but an incredibly fragile thin blue line.
Perhaps it's the visuals. Or maybe it's more than that.
Perhaps you only truly appreciate the Earth when you leave it and all it's amenities behind. Outside of the magnetic shield produced by the spinning molten iron core, the solar winds and radiation can have their way with you. Above the atmosphere you need to bring oxygen along with you, and then you have to deal with the exhaled carbon dioxide. Space offers no food, no air, no water, no protection at all. Perhaps only when you've put your life in the hands of a man-made machine, a spacecraft whose job is to be a mini-Earth, a minor planet for you to live in during your voyage, perhaps only when all of the amenities of Earth are taken from you and replaced with inferior man-made versions that you know are fallible, and you've trained to fix, do you truly appreciate what the Earth has to offer. You know that your spacecraft might run out of breathable air or potable water, and yet many of us on Earth go about our lives as if the air will never go bad and drinkable water will always be handy.
As scary as it might sound, it actually doesn't create a kind of terror or fear, but rather a sense of calm. The Overview Effect is compared to ecstasy, a warmth, a positive feeling of meaning and oneness that draws astronauts and cosmonauts together. It's a boundary dissolving experience. We're all so used to seeing maps or globes with representations of the nations and states clearly delineated by borders and different colors. But from space, the nations disappear, the states vanish, and all that's left is a finite sphere of resources fought over by tiny, invisible creatures somewhere down there. Tiny creatures that have the arrogance to draw lines in the Earth and claim ownership. It all seems so small and insignificant, from nations to wars to corporate profits, none of it matters from 400 kilometers away. But what you can see is pollution. Large cities have their own atmospheres. Smoggy clouds obscure the rigid lines of highways and city blocks.
Kingsley is amazed, in awe, entranced, call it whatever you want, but no words can do justice to the sight before him. Kingsley had been in space twice before, once sub-orbital, another on Griffin 6. But he had never had a view like this. K had read about and spoken to many astronauts, he knew intellectually that spacewalks and views of Earth from lunar orbit were known to induce the overview effect, but again, those are just words echoing in his head. Even Kingsley was unprepared for the feeling. From the hair-raising sensation, to the vertigo, it's an assault on the senses. Kingsley feels his body dissolve and disappear and he is left as just a pair of eyes floating through space, with no body, no ego, nothing but this view and his boggled brain.
“How's the view?” Michael asks over the radio.
“God is that you?” Kingsley asks.
“Just Mike.”
“I'm sure you're probably bored since I've been in the same spot for a while, but I'd like to stay here a bit longer if you don't mind.”
“Kingsley, how long do you think you've been there?”
“Thirty minutes?” K asks.
“More like three minutes,” Michael replies.
“Interesting,” K says. “This is like a drug. If could put this in pill form you'd be a billionaire.”
“I'll see what I can do,” Michael replies.
I'd try to explain to you in more detail what Kingsley could see, or what it felt like to be your own spaceship in low Earth orbit, but there just isn't a combination of words I can come up with to do it justice. We have a tendency as humans to reduce experiences into simple language, but reading or hearing the words that communicate something awesome does not mean you will then experience awe. We think we know so many things that we don't know because we've never had our faces pressed up against the glass, never actually experienced the real thing. For all the years that Kingsley had read, watched, listened, studied, and obsessed about everything space, none of that could accomplish what fifteen seconds of EVA could. If you want to experience it, you have to study hard, that or if you need twenty million bucks handy, otherwise the best you could do is drop acid and watch Planet Earth on Blu-Ray.
After the planned “look at Earth” portion of the mission plan, Michael was to maneuver Kingsley to the Griffin Trunk where he could retrieve more cargo, which was there just to give Kingsley something to do on his spacewalk to see if the suit was flexible, the hands grippable, providing valuable information for the spacesuit engineers back at SpacEx headquarters. Once K had done some hands-on work and placed the car
go in the airlock, there was one late addition to the mission plan. Michael was to maneuver K to beneath the Cupola where he was going to be recorded in HD from a hand-held camera inside the Cupola as he delivered a message to the people in the six states that were trying to make it illegal to sell Tezla cars online.
However, this mission plan immediately went out the window. Kingsley's view was a boundary-dissolving, life-changing event. Suddenly laws seemed meaningless, the squabble petty, the business of those invisible creatures below couldn't matter less to him. He repeatedly delayed the move on to the Griffin Trunk to keep watching the Earth. They went from day to night and back to day, and K was still there, on the end of a mechanical arm, floating like a fetus in the weightless embrace of mother Earth.
Kingsley spent over an hour just watching the Earth. Michael kept calling on the radio every few minutes, just to make sure Kingsley was okay. Finally K relented and moved on in the mission plan. He worked in the Griffin Trunk, extracting two cargo containers from their secure locations. After depositing the cargo in the upper airlock (because they need to keep the airlock Kingsley departed from open so he can return at a moment's notice if something goes wrong), Michael positioned K beneath the Cupola, with his back to the Earth. Arnold insisted on being the director of this little film, as he insisted that it fell into his duties as the only movie star in the space station.
It was night on the Earth beneath them, and so they had some time to kill until the sun would come up again.
“Michael, actually, when we start filming,” K says, “can you have me facing the Earth, and then rotate me around toward the Cupola. Give me like ten seconds before you casually turn me around.”
“Can do,” Michael replies over the radio.
As the sun came up and they crossed the Terminator, the line separating night from day on the Earth, the former Terminator started filming. On YouTube, later that Earth-day, the world would get to see a view of Kingsley's back twenty feet away, outside the safety of the station, as he looked down on the Earth. Then he slowly turns to camera.
“Oh, hi,” he says casually. “I'm Kingsley Pretorius, you might remember me from such things as PalPay, Tezla, and as the guy who has his own space program. I just wanted to say that...it's the god damn future. Just ask Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
Arnold turns the camera around and shows a stern, unshaven, movie-star serious face.
“See, I've got a little company that lets you go to space for a few weeks and be an astronaut for 20 million dollars. In ten years, we'll have the price down to just 1 or 2 million dollars. I'm trying to make the future be like we thought the future should be when I was a kid. You might not be able to afford a trip to space, but many of you can get a taste of the future by buying an all-electric Tezla car. And since it's the future and there are people posting YouTube videos from space, then you should be able to buy a car online, right? Well, not if you live in these states.”
The names of the states appear around Kingsley as he shakes his head.
“Sorry people in those states. Looks like you still live in the past. No buying electric cars on the Internet for you. You're stuck with those old polluting cars you get from used car dealers, because your politicians live in the past. I guess that's what you guys wanted when you voted for your governors and state senators, to stay in the past, in the good old days when you watched movies on VHS tapes and listened to music on vinyl. I guess you guys just like the comfort of the simple things. That's fine. But for the rest of the world, get ready, because it's the future, and there's going to be cool stuff like electric cars, space vacations, and the hyperloop. Just not in these states. Excuse me, my people need me.”
Kingsley raises his arms up over his head Superman style, and then slowly lowers out of frame in the wrong direction, to his surprise.
After a few hours on a walk outside, Kingsley returns to the space station. Tim followed after Kingsley, testing out the second EVA suit which was made in a slightly different way, and performing a similar task in the Griffin Trunk. Once that test was complete, the crew gathered to eat dinner together, except for Caroline, who was conspicuously missing. A couple hours after dinner, Kingsley still hadn't seen Caroline and he went looking for her. He found her on the COLBERT treadmill in the Tranquility module.
“Hey, you need to try that,” K says, floating offset from her at a ninety degree angle.
“Try what?” Caroline asks, working up quite a sweat.
“Spacewalk.”
“No thanks,” Caroline says coldly.
“Could you stop running for a minute?”
“Why?”
“I just want to talk to you about something,” K says.
“I'm listening,” Caroline says, still running. Kingsley reaches over and hits a button that turns the treadmill off. She picks her feet up and the bungees give her a push downward before going slack. “What?” she asks, annoyed.
“You should go on a spacewalk. Seriously, it's...it's life changing.” Kingsley says. “I've changed. Would you please get out of that thing and join me in the Cupola?”
“So you've changed?” Caroline asks sarcastically. “Now you're going to sweet talk me and then try to be the first person to have sex in the Cupola. Is that it?”
“No. I mean, that'd be awesome, but that's not why I'm telling you this.”
“I'll think about going on a spacewalk, but I'm not a whore, I won't be just another notch in your belt of space-firsts. Got it?” Caroline says, turning the treadmill back on before K can even respond. K sighs and floats back toward the central modules. He passes Richard Branson who had been spying on their conversation from just the other side of the hatch.
“Looks like I'm beating you again, K,” Branson says as K floats past.
The next day, Kingsley pestered Caroline to go on a spacewalk with him, but she refused ten or twelve times. The day after that, he asked her twenty times. The day after that, he pestered her more while they were eating lunch.
“I saw Gravity,” Caroline says dismissively.
“Oh come on, it's not going to be like that,” K replies.
“Uh uh, no way.”
“That movie was all Hollywood. I mean that's what Hollywood does. There are three kinds of space movies. There's the Apollo 13 ones where almost everything breaks, but they still live miraculously somehow by nuking the fridge or performing orbital maneuvers with fire extinguishers. Then there are the horror movies where space equals weird alien monsters attacking you. Then there are the philosophical space movies where weird supernatural things happen with space babies.”
“Space babies?” Caroline asks between bites of banana.
“Real space is not like that. We've yet to run into any monsters like Apollo 18, Europa Report, Red Planet, Alien, or Event Horizon would like you to believe. We also haven't discovered that ancient aliens have seeded life on the Earth or have been watching us secretly from the Moon. I mean in Prometheus, there's a weird alien dude that seeds life on Earth...but the seeds of life then create man? What happened to the billions of years of evolution that led to man? That doesn't make any sense. So just as you aren't going to go outside and have a space baby try to tell you about the nature of existence and you aren't going to be attacked by Martian nematodes, you're also not going to get pelted by orbital debris from an explosion of a communications satellite that's in a totally different orbit from yours.
Seriously, Gravity didn't make any sense. I swear, I think most people think if you go straight up into the sky you reach a place called space and it's like the size of city. There's space stations just next door to each other, all satellites are like ten feet from each other. People seem to have no understanding of how big space is. I swear they think you come up here and then the Moon's right there and then Mars is like around the corner. Space has a lot of space. And so collisions are rare. You're not going to get hit by space debris. Movies don't really like to show space as a thing where things go pretty much as planned. I mean, th
ey didn't make an Apollo 13 sequel. Can you imagine it? Apollo 14: Everything Goes as Planned.”
“So nobody's ever been hurt in a spacewalk?” Caroline asks.
“Nope.”
“You promise I'll be perfectly safe?”
“Oh hell no. That shit is dangerous. Luca Parmitano almost drowned on a spacewalk a last year. He was repairing something and then water started filling up his helmet. He couldn't see, water was covering the inside of his visor. His helmet was filling up and he was running out of room to breath. If he didn't get back into the airlock quickly, he would have drowned.”
“Nope,” Caroline declares.
“Kingsley,” Arnold interrupts, having been too busy eating to chime in. “You make fun of Hollywood, but what do you want, boring movies where nothing bad happens? People talk and things are okay?”
“I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that movies avoid realistic drama, real world problems, believable scenarios, instead opting for the most ridiculous unbelievable over-the-top version of the story. And so space movies are always about the spaceship blowing up or alien monsters showing up. You don't see movies where people go into space and encounter realistic problems like nearly drowning on a space walk because of a coolant leak, you get Gravity where they destroy the shuttle, a couple of space stations, all the satellites, it's absurd. I'm saying you can tell dramatic stories without being absurd about. Apollo 13 shows that, but I guarantee you that if Apollo 13 hadn't happened in real life, and then somebody wanted to make a movie like it today, they would have had to tack on something more absurd to it like one of the crew members is a Russian spy or there was a saboteur in NASA and so you think any part of the spacecraft might go wrong at any moment.”
“Oooh, that'd be good, like then every time they hit a button, they'd be like, oh shit, is this gonna blow up?” Arnold says, excitedly.
“But I'm saying, Apollo 13 works without needing that.”
“Because it's a true story,” Caroline says.