Orbital

On an orbital space station, four astronauts and two cosmonauts are slowly waking up in their sleeping bags, which hang suspended in microgravity. Each member of the mission is scheduled to stay on the station for at least nine months. The station galley contains remnants of a birthday celebration they threw the night before, even though it was no one’s birthday.

On Earth, a typhoon begins to form over the Pacific Ocean, moving west toward Asia. The station hurtles in the opposite direction at over 17,000 miles per hour.

One of the Russian cosmonauts, Roman, gets up first and orients his position over Earth. He tallies his 88th day on the station, which is meant to orient himself in time. Each day on the station, he and the other astronauts orbit the Earth 16 times. He marks the end of the night by watching the full moon.

Shaun, the American astronaut, has a postcard of the 1656 painting Las Meninas by Spanish artist Diego Velázquez in his quarters. The postcard was given to him by his wife to recall one of their first interactions in school. As a teen, Shaun failed to understand the teacher’s lesson, which revolved around identifying the subject of the painting amid its multiple perspectives.