OVERVIEW
Orbital is about six astronauts from different countries living together on a space station as they go around the Earth in one day. The story shows what their daily life is like in space, doing science, fixing things, eating, and trying to stay healthy. The astronauts see beautiful things, like storms and city lights on Earth, but they also feel lonely and miss their families. Each person thinks about their own memories and worries, and they often look down at Earth and realize how important it is. The book uses clear language to show how being in space makes people think about friendship, loss, and the beauty of our planet.
BOOK SUMMARY
Over the course of one day, covering sixteen trips around the Earth, Orbital by Samantha Harvey takes readers inside the lives of six astronauts and cosmonauts from different countries living on an international space station. Their daily life includes doing scientific experiments, repairing equipment, exercising, and following small routines that help them feel normal while living in space. Along with these everyday tasks, they experience moments of wonder as they watch the beauty of Earth from above, seeing storms, glowing auroras, and entire continents passing beneath them within minutes.
Each astronaut carries personal memories and emotions. Although the astronauts are very close because they live together, they are also strangers connected mainly by their unusual situation. Their conversations and thoughts move between ordinary daily matters and bigger questions about life, human progress, the damage people have caused to Earth, and the human need for connection even in the vast emptiness of space.
As the day comes to an end, the astronauts go to sleep in their small space modules while the station continues moving silently around Earth. Outside, a crack in the station reminds them that this stage of space exploration will not last forever, as humanity prepares to travel further to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. For now, the six astronauts remain suspended between space and Earth, observing the beauty and fragility of life. The novel ends by reminding readers that human life may be temporary, but every experience still carries meaning and importance.
KEY LITERARY POINTS
The following are the important ideas from the book:
- ISOLATION AND CONNECTION IN SPACE
The astronauts feel both close to each other and lonely at the same time. They live together and share everything, but deep down each person is still alone in space.
Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams – of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses.
(p.8)
There is that idea of a floating family, but in some ways they’re not really a family at all – they’re both much more and much less than that. They’re everything to each other for this short stretch of time because they’re all there is.
(p.23)
- EARTH AS A LIVING ENTITY
Earth is described like a mother and a loved one, something the astronauts deeply miss and admire. It becomes the center of their emotions and reminds them of home.
The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing.
(p.9)
They look down and they understand why it’s called Mother Earth. They all feel it from time to time. They all make an association between the earth and a mother, and this in turn makes them feel like children.
(p.13)
- THE DISORIENTATION OF TIME IN ORBIT
In space, time does not feel normal because the astronauts see sixteen sunrises and sunsets in one day. To stay mentally stable, they depend on fixed daily routines.
Space shreds time to pieces. They were told this in training: keep a tally each day when you wake, tell yourself this is the morning of a new day. Be clear with yourself on this matter. This is the morning of a new day.
(p.11)
They feel space trying to rid them of the notion of days. It says: what’s a day? They insist it’s twenty-four hours and ground crews keep telling them so, but it takes their twenty-four hours and throws sixteen days and nights at them in return.
(p.17)
- GRIEF AND DISTANCE
The novel shows how grief becomes harder in space, especially through Chie, who learns that her mother has died while she is far away in orbit and unable to be with her family.
Since Chie came to the galley on Friday evening where they were making dinner, her face colourless with shock, and said, My mother has died... Chie’s only mother now is that rolling, glowing ball that throws itself involuntarily around the sun once a year.
(p.13)
None of them knows what to say to Chie, what consolation you can offer to someone who suffers the shock of bereavement while in orbit. You must want surely to get home, and say some sort of goodbye. No need to speak; you only have to look out through the window at a radiance doubling and redoubling. The earth, from here, is like heaven.
(p.14)
- THE BEAUTY AND FRAGILITY OF EARTH
From space, human life can only be seen as lights glowing on Earth at night, which shows both the beauty of the planet and how fragile it really is.
From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night. Mankind is the light of cities and the illuminated filament of roads. By day, it’s gone. It hides in plain sight.
(p.18)
It’s the planet’s indifferent turning in indifferent space and the perfection of the sphere which transcends all language. It’s the black hole of the Pacific becoming a field of gold or French Polynesia dotted below, the islands like cell samples, the atolls opal lozenges.
(p.68)
- ROUTINE AND THE EXTRAORDINARY
Everyday life in space is full of technical work, repairs, experiments, and complicated systems, but these ordinary tasks are often interrupted by amazing views of the universe.
Their day is mapped by acronyms, MOP, MPC, PGP, RR, MRI, CEO, OESI, WRT for WSS, T-T-A-B... There’s a lot of contemplation of how it’s possible to get nowhere very fast.
(p.21)
There’s a euphoria that finds you with a velvet stealth, finds you in the blandest of moments, and you can feel the southern hemisphere stars through the craft’s metal shell. Without even looking you can feel them copious and clustered.
(p.52)
- THE POLITICS OF BORDERS AND UNITY
Even though countries on Earth have political conflicts, the astronauts in space must work together and depend on each other. The novel shows how meaningless national divisions can seem when survival requires unity.
RUSSIAN COSMONAUTS ONLY, it says on the door of the Russian WC... And us? We are one. For now at least, we are one. Everything we have up here is only what we reuse and share. We can’t be divided, this is the truth.
(61)
We drink each other’s recycled urine. We breathe each other’s recycled air
(62)
- PERSPECTIVE ON HUMAN SIGNIFICANCE
Looking at Earth from space makes the astronauts think deeply about existence. They realize Earth feels very important to humans, but in the huge universe it is only one small part of something much bigger.
Sometimes they look at the earth and could be tempted to roll back all they know to be true, and to believe instead that it sits, this planet, at the centre of everything. It seems so spectacular, so dignified and regal.
(p.30)
You’d need far more distance from the earth than they have to find it insignificant and small; to really understand its cosmic place. Yet it’s clearly not that kingly earth of old, a God-given clod too stout and stately to be able to move about the ballroom of space; no. Its beauty echoes – its beauty is its echoing, its ringing singing lightness.
(p.30)
- THE IMPACT OF SPACE ON THE BODY AND MIND
Traveling in space affects both the body and the mind. The astronauts face physical weakness, health problems, and mental stress caused by living for long periods away from Earth.
In microgravity their arteries are thickening and stiffening and the muscle of the heart weakening and shrinking. Those hearts, so inflated with ecstasy at the spectacle of space, are at the same time withered by it.
(p.28)
After six months in space they will, in technical terms, have aged 0.007 seconds less than someone on earth. But in other respects they’ll have aged five or ten years more, and this is only in the ways they currently understand.
(p.29)
- THE COSMIC CALENDAR AND HUMAN EPHEMERALITY
Samantha Harvey shows human life against the background of the universe and reminds readers that life is short and temporary, making every human experience precious and meaningful.
We exist now in a fleeting bloom of life and knowing, one finger-snap of frantic being, and this is it. This summery burst of life is more bomb than bud. These fecund times are moving fast.
(p.106)
In the closing second of the cosmic year there’s industrialisation, fascism, the combustion engine... Except of course the universe doesn’t end at the stroke of midnight. Time moves on with its usual nihilism, mows us all down, jaw-droppingly insensate to our preference for living.
(p.104)
CONCLUSION
In the end, Orbital is not just about space travel. It is about people and their feelings, and how life can seem small but special when you look at it from far away. The time the astronauts spend in space helps them and us see how precious Earth is and how much we need each other. The book finishes with the crew quietly sleeping as their space station keeps circling the planet, reminding us that even in the huge emptiness of space, our memories and connections are what matter most.
LINKS AND RESOURCES TO READ MORE ABOUT SAMANTHA HARVEY'S ORBITAL
- Orbital Turns Distance Into Earthly Attention.
- Orbital by Samantha Harvey wins the 2024 Booker prize – a short but powerful story urging us to save the planet.
- Samantha Harvey: ‘Endless cosmic goodness has come my way’.