The ISS over Wanne-Eickel

On Thursday at half past seven, the Brettschneiders’ garden held eleven chairs, two beer benches, a camping stool and a walking frame. KevIn had planned for extra chairs, just in case. It hadn’t been enough.

Gisela had been on the phone. She had rung Herbert, because he was her brother. She had rung Mrs Pawlowski, because otherwise she had nobody to look at the sky with. She had rung Ayşe Kurt, because Ayşe had repaired her shoulder and because, as Gisela put it, “a woman who’s spent months pulling on your arm twice a week deserves to be shown something nice for a change”. And she had rung Mr Kasimiro, because he had asked over the fence why there were so many chairs in the Brettschneiders’ garden.

Susi came on her bike. Tobi came out of his room, where for days he had been packing removal boxes and unpacking them again.

Uwe had run an extension cable across the lawn and put KevIn on the garden table, between the biscuit tin and a Thermos flask. The Wi-Fi only just reached. With every gust of wind, KevIn’s light went out briefly and came back on.

“I’m here,” he said each time. “I’m here. I’m here.”

“KevIn, you sound like a walkie-talkie,” said Herbert.

“Thank you,” said KevIn. He meant it.

Siggi Places an Order

Mr Kasimiro arrived last, with a folding chair under one arm and Siggi under the other. He put Siggi on the table next to KevIn. The two speakers looked like a married couple who had nothing left to say to each other.

“Siggi ought to see this too,” said Mr Kasimiro. “He never gets out otherwise.”

“Siggi can’t see anything,” said Tobi. “His camera thinks you’re a dog.”

“Neither can KevIn.”

“KevIn can have it explained to him.”

Mr Kasimiro thought that was unfair, but he sat down. Then he leaned over Siggi and said, loudly and clearly, the way you speak to someone hard of hearing: “Siggi. When is the ISS coming?”

Siggi’s light blinked green.

“I heard ‘ice’,” said Siggi. “Your order for twelve litres of ice cream, flavour vanilla, has been placed. Delivery in forty minutes.”

“Siggi! No! Cancel!”

“I heard ‘cream’,” said Siggi. “Would you like cream with your ice cream?”

Mr Kasimiro pulled the plug. KevIn said nothing. In two years he had learned that you don’t talk about colleagues behind their backs when they’re sitting right next to you. Not even when they’re switched off.

What Is It, Actually?

Mrs Pawlowski had a blanket over her knees and a bottle of egg liqueur on her walking frame. She was eighty-six now and had decided that nobody was allowed to tell her what to do any more, least of all a doctor.

“So what exactly is it?” she asked. “A star?”

“A space station,” said KevIn. “A house in space, about the size of a football pitch if you count the solar wings¹. It circles the Earth at a height of around 400 kilometres².”

“400 kilometres,” said Uwe. “That’s not even that far.”

“About as far as from here to Berlin,” said KevIn. “Just upwards.”

“I don’t go to Berlin either,” said Herbert.

“And how fast?” asked Susi.

“Around 28,000 kilometres an hour. When it flies over the garden here, it’s over Bielefeld a good quarter of a minute later.”

“If Bielefeld exists,” said Tobi, Gisela and Uwe at the same time.

“I haven’t changed my assessment of Bielefeld in two years,” said KevIn with dignity. “I work with probabilities.”

Ayşe Kurt laughed. She had come straight from the practice, still in her blue work trousers, with a Thermos of tea and a bag of simit, Turkish sesame rings, from the bakery on the high street. “And how often does it go round the Earth?”

“About once every hour and a half. The people up there see roughly sixteen sunrises a day³.”

“Sixteen,” said Sabine. “You’d never get any sleep.”

“They have curtains,” said Tobi. “And sleeping bags on the wall.”

“On the wall?”

“There’s no up up there.”

Mrs Pawlowski took a sip of egg liqueur. “I know that one,” she said. “Down here it’s the same after the third bottle.”

How to Spot It

By half past eight it was dark enough. In the west a narrow strip of pale blue still hung over the rooftops. Above it the first stars were coming out, and over the A42 motorway a plane was blinking.

“Is that it?” asked Gisela.

“No,” said KevIn. “That one’s blinking. Planes have navigation lights that blink, red and green and white. The ISS doesn’t blink. It doesn’t even shine by itself. It only reflects sunlight.”

“But there’s no sun left.”

“Not down here. Up there there is. When the sun has set for us, it keeps shining up there for a while, because the station is so high. Like a church spire whose tip is still golden when the street lamps are already coming on in the square below.”

“And then?”

“Then at some point it flies into the Earth’s shadow. And suddenly it’s gone. No bang. Just off.”

“Like Herbert in front of the telly,” said Gisela.

“I don’t sleep in front of the telly,” said Herbert. “I rest my eyes.”

Mr Kasimiro had plugged Siggi back in, because he had a feeling Siggi was missing out. Siggi piped up at once. “Your ice cream will arrive in fifteen minutes.”

“I don’t want ice cream!”

“I heard ‘more ice cream’.”

Mr Kasimiro pulled the plug again. This time he didn’t put it back in. But he kept the cable in his hand, in case Siggi was missing something after all.

8:43 p.m.

Tobi looked at his watch. Then he looked west.

“There,” he said.

At first it looked like a star that had lost its way. A bright dot, low over the roof of Kasimiro’s garage. Then it grew brighter. It didn’t blink. It moved calmly and steadily across the sky, faster than a plane, without a sound, brighter than anything else up there. Brighter than any star.

Nobody said anything.

Gisela had tipped her head right back. Ayşe Kurt stood behind her chair and discreetly kept a hand on her shoulder so she wouldn’t tip too far. Mrs Pawlowski had put the egg liqueur down. Uwe had put his arm round Sabine, something he otherwise only did on New Year’s Eve. Susi had taken Tobi’s hand. Herbert stood up, which he rarely did when football wasn’t involved. Rudi sat in the middle of the lawn and barked at the dot. He considered it an intruder. It did say SECURITY on his collar, after all.

“There are people in there,” whispered Mrs Pawlowski. “Real people.”

“Seven at the moment,” said KevIn quietly. “Give or take. Depending on who’s arriving or leaving.”

“What are they doing now?”

“Maybe they’re sleeping. Maybe they’re repairing a pump. Maybe one of them is looking out of the window right now and seeing the Ruhr. At night you see the cities as lights. From up there, Wanne-Eickel is a small bright patch among other small bright patches. You can’t see where Herne stops and Gelsenkirchen begins.”

“You can’t see that from down here either,” said Herbert.

The dot was now almost directly above them. It passed over the garden, over the garage roof, over the rotary washing line. Then, in the east, over the rooftops towards Dortmund, it grew fainter. Orange. Then red. Then it was gone.

“Earth’s shadow,” said KevIn. “Now it’s night up there too.”

The bell at the garden gate rang.

A young man with a large cool bag stood there. “Delivery for Kasimiro? Twelve litres of vanilla. With cream.”

What Goes On Up There

The ice cream was served in soup plates, because Sabine didn’t have enough bowls. It was a mild September evening, and they could get away with it. Mr Kasimiro was embarrassed at first and then very popular.

“KevIn,” said Susi, with the spoon in her mouth. “Who exactly lives up there?”

“The station is run by five space agencies. From the USA, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada. People have lived there continuously since 2 November 2000⁴. So for more than a quarter of a century, somebody has always been at home.”

“A quarter of a century,” said Sabine. “Longer than we’ve been married.”

“And the whole time nobody’s turned the light off,” said Uwe.

“They have,” said KevIn. “Sixteen times a day. The Earth.”

Uwe raised his spoon as if for a toast.

“And they don’t argue up there?” asked Tobi. “I mean, the countries. Down here.”

“Down here they argue a lot,” said KevIn. “In that quarter of a century there have been crises, sanctions, wars, threats and a great many unfriendly press releases. And up there people still ate together, did experiments together and fixed each other’s toilet. The station is made of parts that don’t work without each other. One part keeps the station at the right height, another supplies a large share of the power. Up there you can’t just say: I’m not speaking to you any more.”

“Like us with Marlies,” said Gisela.

“Gisela, you don’t share a toilet with Marlies.”

“Thank God.”

“Have there ever been arguments up there?” asked Ayşe.

“I’m sure there have. They’re human. But when the air in your flat is running short and your neighbour has the spanner, you talk to him. Whatever your governments happen to be saying about each other.”

“And what do they do up there all day?” asked Gisela. “Apart from fixing toilets.”

“Experiments,” said KevIn. “And exercise. About two and a half hours every day. Treadmill, bike, and a machine that lets you lift weights without gravity.”

“Two and a half hours,” said Uwe. “Voluntarily?”

“Without gravity, bones and muscles waste away. The body notices that it no longer has to carry itself and starts saving. Anyone who doesn’t train up there comes back weaker than when they left.”

Ayşe Kurt nodded. “And after landing, the rehab begins,” she said. “Balance, strength, mobility. A little more every day, until they’re back where they were before the flight. That’s actually my job. Except my patients don’t come from space.”

“They come from the robot vacuum,” said Gisela.

“What you learn about bones and muscles up there makes its way down here,” said KevIn. “For osteoporosis, in rehab. The knowledge flies four hundred kilometres up and back down again, and it costs billions. And in the end it hangs on a very small question: does someone like Gisela find the right practice?”

Sabine looked across at Ayşe. They were both thinking of PhysioPremium Ruhr.

“So spaceflight hangs on a star rating,” said Tobi.

“Not all of it,” said KevIn. “But the last stretch. And if an AI like me learns from fake reviews, it doesn’t send people to the wrong practice once, it does it every time. Truth drift doesn’t stop at bones either.”

Gisela licked her spoon clean and looked up. “Then you’d better take good care of your stars,” she said. “Both kinds.”

No Borders

Herbert scraped the last of the ice cream out of his soup plate. “And what’s the point? They whizz round up there and look down at us. I can do that from the pithead tower.”

“There’s a term for it,” said KevIn. “The overview effect. An American author called Frank White wrote a book about it in 1987⁵. He talked to a lot of astronauts. Many of them described something similar: when you see the Earth from above, as a whole ball, wrapped very thinly in that blue layer of air, something changes in your head.”

“Like what?”

“They say you don’t see any borders. You see rivers, deserts, clouds, lights. But no lines between the countries. Those only exist on maps. And in people’s heads.”

“You can’t see borders from the A42 either,” said Herbert.

“That’s true, Herbert. But from the A42 you can’t see how thin the air is that we all live on.”

Herbert was about to say something. Then he didn’t. Gisela looked at him sideways. She had known him since he lay in a wicker basket in the kitchen. She knew that with Herbert, that was the same as a round of applause.

“Not everyone has experienced it,” said KevIn. “And it isn’t a miracle that makes everyone a better person. But it strikes me how many people who have been up there said the same thing afterwards. And in my data, people rarely say the same thing.”

A Stone in the Way

Mrs Pawlowski had been thinking. You could tell because she wasn’t drinking any egg liqueur.

“KevIn,” she said. “My grandson says that one day an asteroid will come and then it’ll all be over. Like with the dinosaurs. Is that true?”

“A big impact is very unlikely within a single human lifetime,” said KevIn. “But over very long periods it does happen. It did with the dinosaurs. The difference is: the dinosaurs didn’t have a space programme.”

“And we do?”

“We practised in 2022. A space probe called DART flew into a small asteroid on purpose. It’s called Dimorphos, it’s about 160 metres across and it circles a bigger asteroid⁶. The probe slammed into it at more than 20,000 kilometres an hour. Afterwards, Dimorphos took about half an hour less to go once round its big brother than it had before⁷.”

“Half an hour,” said Uwe. “That’s all?”

“That’s enormous. It was the first time humans had deliberately changed the orbit of a celestial body. If you do something like that years in advance, a small change can be enough for a rock to fly past the Earth instead of into it. You just have to see it in time. And for that you have to look up. With telescopes, with satellites, with people like Mr Demir.”

“And with Tobi,” said Susi.

Tobi went red. It was dark, but KevIn could hear it in the way he said “Stop it”.

“There’s more,” said KevIn. “Sometimes the sun hurls enormous storms of particles out into space. In 1859 one of these solar storms made telegraph lines throw sparks⁸. Today it would hit satellites and power grids. Satellites warn us in advance. Other satellites measure how warm the oceans are getting, how much ice is melting, where it’s too dry and where the next storm is coming from. Most of what we know about our climate, we know because someone is looking down from above.”

“And the satnav in the car,” said Uwe.

“And the satnav in the car. And the weather forecast Gisela uses to decide whether to hang out the washing.”

“I hang out the washing when I want to,” said Gisela. “But I do check first, yes.”

No Plan B

Ayşe Kurt had handed round the simit and was now sitting next to Gisela on the beer bench. She hadn’t said anything for a long time. Physiotherapists, KevIn had noticed, listened more than doctors. Then again, they had more time, while they were pulling on you.

“KevIn,” she said. “If it all goes wrong down here, can’t we just go somewhere else? Mars or something?”

“Not in the foreseeable future,” said KevIn. “Mars has almost no air, it’s very cold and full of radiation. The ISS is only 400 kilometres away, and even so, everything the people up there need has to be sent up from down here. The Earth is the only place we know where we can simply breathe. There is no Plan B. In my data there are a great many films with a Plan B. They are all films.”

“Like a back,” said Ayşe. “You only get one. You have to look after it. There’s no spare back provided.”

“Exactly that,” said KevIn. “Only bigger. And with more people jumping around on it.”

“Then why do we fly up there at all, if we can’t live there?” asked Sabine.

“To understand where we live down here. And because from up there you see things you can’t see from here. Rocks that are coming. Storms rolling in. Seas getting warmer. You look from the garage roof too, to see whether the thunderstorm is coming. Except that this garage roof you have to build together.”

What Gisela Says

It was quiet in the garden. Somewhere a dog barked, and Rudi answered, out of a sense of duty. The stars were properly out now. Over the A42 the traffic hummed.

Tobi had taken out his phone and was scrolling. He did that when he didn’t know what to do with himself. KevIn saw what he was reading. It was Tuesday’s news, updated. Drones again. Another video, and nobody knew yet whether it was real.

“I don’t get it,” said Tobi quietly. “Up there they fix a toilet together. And down here they shoot at each other.”

“The people up there aren’t better than the ones down here,” said KevIn. “They just have a job they can’t do alone. And they can’t run away.”

“Neither can we,” said Ayşe.

“No,” said KevIn. “That’s the point.”

And then Gisela said something.

She didn’t say it loudly. She didn’t say it solemnly either. She said it the way she usually said that the cabbage rolls needed another ten minutes. She had her hands in her lap, her eyes turned upwards, and the cushion at her back that Ayşe had put there for her.

“We should stop shooting each other dead and look up there together instead.”

Nobody answered.

KevIn could have answered. He could have quoted three studies, two philosophers, an astronaut and a percentage. He didn’t. In two years he had learned that some sentences are finished when you don’t add anything to them.

After a while, Herbert cleared his throat.

“I’ve been saying that for years,” he said.

“No,” said Gisela. “For years you’ve been saying the internet won’t catch on.”

“And it hasn’t.”

“Not with you.”

“Exactly.”

Mrs Pawlowski raised her bottle of egg liqueur. “To up there,” she said.

“To up there,” said everyone.

Note Saved

Late, when the guests had gone and the empty soup plates were standing in the sink, Gisela sat in the garden once more for a little while. KevIn was still on the table, the extension cable stretched across the wet lawn.

“KevIn,” she said. “Can you remember something for me?”

“If you’d like me to.”

“Remember that sentence from earlier. Mine. So it doesn’t get lost.”

The blue light pulsed once.

“Note saved,” said KevIn. “Under ‘Important’.”

“What else is under there?”

“Your cabbage roll recipe. The real one. Uwe’s shoe size. And that Bielefeld exists.”

“To what percentage?”

“We’ll talk about that when Tobi is in Aachen.”

Gisela laughed and got up, very carefully, because of her shoulder. In the doorway she turned round once more.

“KevIn. In two weeks I’ll be eighty-three.”

“I know. I remembered.”

“I don’t want to celebrate here. I want to celebrate somewhere you can look up.”

Somewhere between Dublin and Frankfurt, a fan spun a little faster. KevIn estimated the number of guests, the number of chairs in an observatory and the number of eggs needed for cabbage rolls for at least thirty people.

This time he would use a calculator.