What the orbital perspective is is a slightly different way of looking at
our global society and looking at our planet. It’s a perspective that takes a long term
view. It’s a perspective that takes a big picture view. And when we zoom out and see
our planet from space a lot of things become clear. Not only do we see where the pieces
of the puzzle fit but who has them and what value they add. And I think it’s an acknowledgement
that we don’t have to accept the status quo on our planet. It’s a belief that anything
is possible. That we through working together can really tackle the big problems facing
our planet.
So I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve had a lot of perspective shifting experiences.
I lived on the bottom of the ocean for three weeks in Aquarius, the only undersea laboratory.
I flew once on the U.S. Space Shuttle on a two week construction mission aboard the International
Space Station. And I spent about half a year, half of 2011, living and working on board
the International Space Station after launching from Kazakhstan on a Russian rocket with a
couple of Russian crewmates.
When it was time to depart the space station and return home my Russian crewmates and I
climbed in into our Soyuz spacecraft, the same one we launched from five and a half
months earlier. We wiggled into our seats, you know, we had our spacesuits on. We strapped
ourselves in. It’s really tight – it’s like three guys in the back of the trunk of
a car. Our knees are in our chest. We undocked from the space station and I had a window.
I was sitting in the right seat. I had a window right by my head and I strained as best I
could to see the space station as we were departing it because I knew quite likely that
would be the last time I ever saw this magnificent sight. And after we undocked we did a couple
laps around the planet and as we passed the south tip of South America we fishtailed our
spacecraft around to point the engines backwards. And I remember when we did this I saw this
crescent moon go by the window. It was just absolutely breathtaking.
We fired our engines just a little bit at precisely the right moment to have us enter
the upper atmosphere. And as we entered the upper atmosphere we started to develop drag,
you know. We had this fiery violent ride through the atmosphere. It was really amazing. Once
you got down to a lower altitude the speed really becomes amazing. And I remember seeing,
oh, there goes Africa as we whizzed by the continent. And the parachutes opened. They
threw us all over the place. Shortly thereafter we smashed into the ground. We bounced. We
flipped. We rolled over. And when we rolled over we rolled on the right side. And now
my window was pointing at the ground and I remember looking out of the window and seeing
a rock, a flower and a blade of grass. And I remember thinking to myself distinctly that
I’m home. And what was really amazing about that thought was that I was in Kazakhstan.
And so for me at that moment my home was no longer Houston, Texas, where I live with my
family or Yonkers, New York, where I was born and grew up. My home was Earth and that was
really a perspective shifting moment for me.
So one of the big tenets of the book and the reason why I cite and tell so many stories
about people that are accomplishing amazing things that have never been in space – one
of the main tenets is that you don’t have to be in orbit to have the orbital perspective.
We don’t have to be in space to realize that we need each other. We don’t have to
be in space to realize that by being open to new innovative partnerships, new innovative
solutions, answers can come to the challenges we face from anywhere in the world. And so
I think the big thing is to understand the framework that we built to view the world
in. Now we live as we all know in a very, very complicated world. There’s so many
horrors. There’s terrorism. There’s poverty. There’s almost a billion people that don’t
have access to clean water. There’s so many ills that our global society face.
But our world also has compassion and love and ingenuity and creativity and self-sacrifice.
And so it becomes very complicated and what we tend to do, and myself included, we tend
to build a more simplified framework through which to view the world, through which to
view our global society. And when we do that we tend to build cubby holes and put people
and groups into certain cubbyholes. It just makes it easier and more palpable to understand
the events, the current events of the day. But what that does is it also creates barriers
and walls. We box ourselves into these cubbyholes which at sometimes prevents us from dialogue,
prevents us from recognizing any merit in the position, in another person’s position,
another group’s position because we’ve written off whole groups of people, whole
countries, whole cultures as not worth our time, not worth our – there’s no value
in the problem solving process to engage those people.
And I think once we realize that and we can step outside of it – and I don’t just
mean, you know, people and organizations. You know there’s political parties. A good
example is the political process in the U.S. right now where we’ve become so divided
and to the point where one side will refuse to recognize any merit whatsoever in the position
of the other side. If they win, we lose. If they gain, we lose. And so I think that is
a recipe for disaster. It’s a recipe for not being able to have progress. It’s a
barrier to us being able to tackle the big problems. And so I think you don’t have
to go to space to realize that. You don’t have to go to space to realize that each and
every one of us is riding through the universe together on this spaceship that we call Earth,
that we’re all interconnected, we’re all in this together and that we’re all family.
And I think one of the big things that the orbital perspective teaches us is there are
no passengers on spaceship Earth. We’re all crewmates and as crewmates we have a responsibility
to mind the ship and take care of our fellow crewmates.