Home sweet home in orbit
From afar, the International Space Station might look like a gangling machine, or like robot butterflies mating, but inside it is a cradle of humanity. Over the past 20 years, 141 people from 19 countries have worked, played with their food, grumbled about the toilet, drawn blood, spacewalked and gazed up and down at the universe, and at Earth.
In the process they have thronged their high-tech surroundings with gear, including laptops and cameras, and plastered the walls with mission stickers and photographs of friends, loved ones and heroes of the Space Age such as Yuri Gagarin. Toys, stuffed animals and even orderly graffiti — the signatures of crew members and visitors — abound.
This is documented in the new book “Interior Space: A Visual Exploration of the International Space Station,” by Roland Miller and Paolo Nespoli. The result is a hightech tour of the home in the sky.
The space station has been variously occupied by as few as two astronauts ( just enough to keep the lights on) and as many as 13 (when the space shuttle visited with new crews). Most of their work — endless medical and biological tests on weightlessness, maintenance of the ever-growing station — has not garnered headlines. Astronaut Scott Kelly spent a year in space while his twin, Mark (now running to be Arizona’s senator), stayed on Earth to compare their physiologies.
For many, the outpost’s high point came in 2013 when Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, on his last mission in space, sang David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” while floating with his guitar in a most peculiar way through the ISS.
Over two decades, an international community has sprung up, of people who have been to space, have lived in space or expect to live in space, people so enthusiastic that some, like Charles Simonyi, the Microsoft billionaire and philanthropist, have paid millions of dollars to go.
Quietly, these astronauts and other offworld tourists have created a style for future space exploration — best practices for living and communing in space with grace and dignity. In “Interior Space,” Nespoli, a veteran Italian astronaut, recalls his shipmate Cady Coleman playing her flute in the station’s windowed dome that offers views of Earth, and hearing her music.
The photos are a collaboration between Miller, a photographer, and Nespoli, who was flying his last mission on the space station, in 2017. “To our knowledge, this is the first collaboration at this level between a visual artist on Earth and an astronaut in space,” Miller emailed.
Ea r thbound, Miller scoured Google for images of the space station and potential scenes he wanted captured, and emailed them to Nespoli. Nespoli took the shots and emailed them back to Miller, who critiqued them.