“Look at the smallest thing you can, and don’t move,” Harrison told her as they hung in their sleeping bags.

Joan moaned. She was determined to finish her experiments. But it was making her feel even sicker to think about them.

“Don’t look out the window—it’s not like being carsick,” Harrison said.

“I know,” Joan said. “I’m trying to just keep my eyes closed.”

“No,” Harrison said. “Do what I did and look at your fingernail. For as long as you can stand to.”

She stared at her fingernail for six and a half hours.

“You hanging in there, Goodwin?” Donna said through the earpiece at some point on day four. What a joy it was, to hear Donna speaking to her as CAPCOM. Joan knew that it could not have been easy to get everyone on board with her coming back to work so quickly. But Donna, clearly, had pushed it through. How delightfully unsurprising. Joan was not sure that she herself would have that in her. But it thrilled her to know that Donna did. That Donna would make the world give her all the things she wanted all at once. “Feeling any better?”

She wanted to tell Donna everything. She wanted to say, I don’t think humans are meant to be up here. And I’m worried I’ve spent my entire life hoping for something it turns out I can’t stand. And I don’t know who I might be anymore if I don’t want to do this ever again.

But there would be time for that later. Instead, she said, “I’ll survive.”

—

On the fifth day, not long before the end of the mission, Joan felt well enough to look out the window.

As she stared ahead, at the big, bright, deep blue of the oceans of Earth, she took a full breath for the first time in days.

There it was.

Earth.

Daytime over the Pacific Ocean.

She looked at the western coast of the United States—all green and fading brown, cloud patterns across it in the starkest white. She could spot Baja California, but she could not tell where the border between the United States and Mexico was for certain. She could not see countries, with firm lines and borders. She saw only landmasses, undivided.

It was so funny to her, in that moment, to think that only American-trained space explorers were called “astronauts.” That if you were trained in the Soviet Union you were a “cosmonaut.” How utterly silly to make that distinction, when Russia kissed North America the way it did.

She thought back to Sputnik 1.