51 pages • 1 hour read
Samantha HarveyOrbital
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 10-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “Orbit 6”
There are two toilets on the space station: One is exclusive to the Russian cosmonauts, while the other is open to all other nationalities. The rules around their use represent the passive-aggressive behavior between the two factions of space agencies, which the station crew finds ridiculous. They look past their national identities and see their crewmates as part of one community.
The station crew uses a virtual-reality headset that tests their hand-eye coordination and reflexes in microgravity. They often fail the test, reporting results that are several seconds off the mark. The voice in the headset chides them for their degraded neural-motor functions, which it suggests is a symptom of long-term space travel. The voice further mocks them by relating their rapid movement over the Earth to the brevity of their mission. Their time in space will be over before they know it, and they will emerge from their capsules weaker in mind and body.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Orbit 7”
Nell recalls her first spacewalk, during which she installed the spectrometer with Pietro. Nell was initially terrified of being out in open space, so she focused on adapting to her movement in zero gravity. Walking in open space made the Earth feel suddenly surreal. She now yearns to drift over the Earth, fulfilling her childhood dreams of flight.
At night, cities become visible to the station crew. They can point out their respective home cities, tracing the roads that lead to them. Sometimes, they prefer how simple the world looks in the daytime, with the shapes of land broken up by water and vice versa.
During training, the space agencies warned them that this would delude them into thinking that there were no national borders and geopolitics. True enough, the crew feels protective of the entire Earth, longing for international peace. They find the news they read insulting. They distract themselves with entertainment. In time, they realize that the world is governed by “the politics of want” (111), which literally reshapes the world by depleting forests or raising the global temperature to indulge various interests. They recognize how the space missions play into those politics, considering the large quantities of fuel required to launch them into space.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Orbit 8, Ascending”
In Arizona, there are man-made craters that the first lunar mission used as a training site for module landing.
The typhoon intensifies, turning into a category five, possibly even a super-typhoon. The space station veers toward the day when the typhoon will finally make landfall. The crew finishes their last tasks of the day.
Three months earlier, Roman, Nell, and Shaun arrived on the station together. After several hours of travel and docking procedures, they were welcomed by Anton, Pietro, and Chie. Sometime later, they spoke to their families and slept poorly, struggling to acclimate to the sickening conditions of space. The following day, they adjusted and learned to float effortlessly through the station.
Pietro observes how much his body has shrunk in the last six months. His thoughts have slowed down as well. One month into his mission, he had an erotic dream about his wife and longed for her. Following his spacewalk with Nell, he had an erotic dream about her as well and was deeply embarrassed. Since then, he has not had any more feelings of erotic desire.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Orbit 8, Descending”
Before she came to space, Nell realized that microgravity would feel like freediving. The most she ever felt this was when she went freediving at night. While she prepares cargo bags for disposal, a memory comes to her of her mother putting things away during a family vacation.
Nell thinks about the difference between herself and her husband, who requires stability or else his life will overwhelm him. His feelings make him incapable of living in space and looking at the Earth all day. He often sends pictures of the space station in the sky, noting that she is no longer there by the time she receives the photo. In return, she sends him pictures of her life aboard the station, as well as pictures of Ireland, where he is. Throughout most of their relationship, she has been preparing to travel to space. She has barely spent any time with him in the family home he moved to live in while she was away. He acknowledges that both of them are “equally unknown,” albeit in different ways.
Chapters 10-13 Analysis
These chapters dive deeper into The Human Cost of Climate Change by suggesting its causes and underlining the space mission’s complicity in this impact. These issues are framed by the growing political awareness of the station crew, who grow tired of the petty arguments between their nations. At first, the crew members respond by openly flaunting the territorial rules that the space agencies impose throughout the station. They know that there is no real way for the agencies to sanction them while they continue their missions in space. At the same time, the lack of sanction opens them up to thinking more critically about the root causes of these conflicts.
Looking at the Earth, the crew members find comfort in the absence of geopolitical borders. Though they can locate their home cities, Shaun finds it difficult to map out which country is which in Chapter 6, suggesting that political borders are fundamentally imaginary. Moreover, the lack of human presence in space makes it necessary for them to rely on each other for company. The crew looks past their national identities to find common ground, becoming part of the unified body as described in Chapter 4. As they continue to look at the Earth, the station crew’s inability to perceive the borders makes them yearn for a world where these borders and the rules that they imply are irrelevant.
Naturally, ground control warns them against thinking this way because it goes against the interests of the nations they serve. The crew members’ resistance to a national agenda makes them conscious of the “politics of want” (111), which indulges the needs of wealthier countries to the disadvantage of countries that do not enjoy the same privileges. The novel has demonstrated this disparity already through the juxtaposition of Pietro’s friend, the fisherman, who is threatened by the growing typhoon while a new lunar mission is launched to write the future of human civilization. Rather than devote their resources to undoing or mitigating the effects of climate change, the Global North nations, like the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Japan, and Russia, devote large amounts of fuel and other resources to conquer the orbit and the moon. The station crew sees this impact from space, observing how the face of the world is literally reshaped by urbanization.
These chapters also drive the idea that life in space is unnatural, or at least challenging to adapt to considering the familiar ways of human life. Pietro reflects on the idea that the human body is not built for prolonged space travel as someone who has been on the station for six months. The novel also recounts the arrival of Roman, Nell, and Shaun on the station, each of them experiencing sickness as they attempted to acclimate to the conditions of microgravity. When Nell went on her first spacewalk, she experienced a surreal shift in perception, floating above the orb of the Earth.
The impact of space travel on their bodies is emphasized by the virtual headset test, which only seems to mock their decisions to pursue life in space rather than encourage them. The headset cites the negative impact of space on their bodies and their minds to underline the futility of space travel and the endeavor to inhabit it. If these chapters show how certain countries devote their resources to space travel, they also show how the very nature of space seems to reject human life. This speaks to the possibility that humanity is better suited to life on Earth, where the most hostile force is humanity itself.
