The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 1626562466
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
For astronaut Ron Garan, living on the International Space Station was a powerful, transformative experience—one that he believes holds the key to solving our problems here on Earth.
On space walks and through windows, Garan was struck by the stunning beauty of the Earth from space but sobered by knowing how much needed to be done to help this troubled planet. And yet on the International Space Station, Garan, a former fighter pilot, was working work side by side with Russians, who only a few years before were “the enemy.” If fifteen nationalities could collaborate on one of the most ambitious, technologically complicated undertakings in history, surely we can apply that kind of cooperation and innovation toward creating a better world. That spirit is what Garan calls the “orbital perspective.”
Garan vividly conveys what it was like learning to work with a diverse group of people in an environment only a handful of human beings have ever known. But more importantly, he describes how he and others are working to apply the orbital perspective here at home, embracing new partnerships and processes to promote peace and combat hunger, thirst, poverty, and environmental destruction. This book is a call to action for each of us to care for the most important space station of all: planet Earth. You don't need to be an astronaut to have the orbital perspective. Garan's message of elevated empathy is an inspiration to all who seek a better world.
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river, but it turned out to be not a natural reflection at all. That line was actually the illuminated human-made border between India and Pakistan. Seeing that border from space, a true barrier to collaboration, had a huge effect on me. For the fifty-plus years that humans have been flying in space, astronauts and cosmonauts have commented on how beautiful, tranquil, peaceful, and fragile our planet looks from space. These are not trite clichés; it truly is moving to see our planet from space.
ever really got off the ground. In some cases, simplified frameworks led to initial failures on both sides to empathize with the history and expectations of the other. A simplified framework also can lead to a tendency to treat an event as a snapshot, or worse, as one in a series of snapshots that confirms the generalizations we’ve constructed about another, that disregards the history that led up to the situation and the possible global trajectory implied by that situation. Such a framework
do find—a greater percentage of people who understand the orbital perspective and who practice elevated empathy. Incentivizing Change In the fall of 2004, I met a twenty-one-year-old student intern from the University of Colorado named Evan Thomas, an aerospace engineering undergraduate working at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. I was interested in development work, and Evan had already amassed a fairly impressive amount of it. He had traveled the globe to such places as Cuba, Nepal, and Vietnam
enables people to build trust with their followers, to feel a real connection, and to build a level of trust even though they never meet face-to-face. Lily Cole is a successful model, actress, and social entrepre- 156 Co n c l u sio n neur—though her real claim to fame, in my book, is that as an undergrad at Cambridge she interviewed Stephen Hawking for her thesis paper. Cole founded impossible.com in response to a question that perplexed her: Why do societies collapse in the wake of an
(whether run by governments, nongovernment organizations, multinationals, or anyone else) will share their data in meaningful, user-friendly ways to enable, when appropriate, working together seamlessly toward common goals that benefit the global social body. Funders could even encourage and reward this noncompetitive behavior by tying funding to data sharing. In large part, this effort will also require a commitment to creating a coordinating body that unites the various platforms that are
