Memoirs of returned astronauts are a very niche type of book, and I’ve enjoyed all the ones I’ve read. This one confirmed that trend for me. Nicole Stott was an astronaut and engineer with NASA for 27 years. The book itself was less focused on her life than I had expected, but I wasn’t disappointed with what I got. She writes with such passion about what is important to her, and you can tell she enjoys sharing and teaching.

The book has seven sections, each focused on a lesson that she’s come to understand over the course of her life and career. These lessons are about the interconnected quality of life on Earth and what we can do to take care of our planet. I would have liked more descriptions on how the experiments on the ISS work to improve life on earth. We get brief mentions of these, but I wanted a lot more.

There were a couple drawbacks for me. Her point of view felt very narrow, even as she promotes global cooperation. Another issue I felt was that a lot of her steps to taking care of our earth were “treat the symptoms” focused instead of addressing root causes. There’s a lot of praise for charities and organizations and their actions, but no serious calling out of the structural problems of colonization or loosening environmental regulations. It felt like the lectures in elementary school in a drought hit area about turning off the water while brushing your teeth at the same time that golf courses in the USA use billions of gallons of water daily to keep the grass green.

In short, this is a good starting point for anyone becoming interested in exploring environmentalism and conservation. But it’s only a first step.

Space is an interesting concept to me, so when someone who's been there writes about it I'm always interested. I enjoyed the way Ms. Stott writes and it left me really thinking.

Writing a memoir of any kind is hard. When you set yourself the challenge of using your experience as one of the few humans who have “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” to teach us about ecological awareness, the bar rises further. Back to Earth has a certain kind of charm to its optimistic idea that orbiting the planet helps you feel like we’re all in this together. Maybe I’m just getting pessimistic at the ripe old age of 32, but this book didn’t quite work for me. Then again, it’s entirely possible I’m just not Nicole Stott’s target audience.

Thanks to NetGalley and Perseus Books for the eARC in exchange for a review.

I don’t mind Stott’s premise—it’s neat! I agree that seeing our planet from space should make us feel more connected. We should think more about ecosystems, about the water cycle, about the importance of bug species. So for Stott to spend some time devoted to these issues, while also talking about what life is like in space, is a good things. I think there is an audience for this book who will love it, so don’t read this review as a critique of the book’s very existence.

With that being said, there was something that rankled me as I read this book. It took me a while to realize what it is: Stott has a very white, very American, very individualist idea of progressiveness. She happily acknowledges injustices in the world like millions of people who don’t have access to clean drinking water. But she spends a lot of time praising the activities of people like Scott Harrison, who founded charity: water, rather than engaging with the underlying reasons why people don’t have clean drinking water (for example, here in Canada it’s because of ongoing colonialism and a federal government that is entirely performative in its reconciliation with Indigenous peoples). Similarly, Stott explores the mechanisms behind climate change and goes so far as to acknowledge that companies and countries both need to cut emissions—we are all in this together, she exhorts—yet she always returns to what we as individuals should be doing.

(The whiteness continues with a bizarre editorial decision to name one of the chapters “Respect the Thin Blue Line.” It’s referring to the Earth’s atmosphere, but the resonance with the slogan for the pro-police, anti-Black Blue Lives Matter movement did not escape me. Read the room, editors.)

I get it. The book is meant to inspire readers (who are probably far younger than myself) to take action. And the best way to do that is to talk about what concrete actions you can take as an individual. However, this can flatten the complexity of these problems and perpetuate a narrative of individualism that is counter-productive to real change.

In recent months, multiple billionaires have gone to space (or not quite, depending on the definition of “space” that you use). It hasn’t inspired any miraculous transformations of conscience on the part of these people. They still have their billions, and our system is still capitalist and corrupt. Going to space does not automatically change people for the better or create feelings of unity and solidarity.

Back to Earth attempts valiantly to draw parallels between issues of environmental justice. Yet it’s clumsy and misses the mark because its focus is too myopic. Stott wants us to care about the planet, and by extension, all the people and creatures on it. This format is fine on the surface, and I believe it is possible to read this book in a surface-level way. There is a lot of good information you could learn from this; I enjoyed reading about the successful attempts to ban chlorofluorocarbons. Alas, I am also somewhat tired of books that come close to getting to the root of these problems yet ultimately don’t engage with them. I’m sure Stott has her reasons. Maybe she feels like it isn’t her place, like her role as an ex-astronaut is to inspire rather than share an opinion she might view as uninformed. Maybe she just wanted to write something conscious yet also light. I can get behind that. But it isn’t what I wanted to read.

A staple of astronaut memoirs is the attempt to communicate the near-religious experience of seeing the Earth from space for the first time, a moment which no picture (authors like Massimino aver) can really capture. Earth appears both beyond momentous and achingly vulnerable, its billions of human lives protected only by the thinnest whisp of an atmosphere. Nicola Scott makes the implications of that fragile image her theme, musing on lessons that her work in NASA, and particularly her time abroad the shuttles and the station, have taught her.

Across three shuttle missions and two ISS expeditions, Stott has lived well over a hundred days in space. Life aboard the Station, where only a thin skin of metal protected Stott and her crewmates from death, where their resources were scarce and closely monitored, and everyone out of necessity shouldered responsibility for their common fate, made her doubly aware of the importance of stewardship once back to Earth. Stott’s memoir of her time in space is unusual in that it lacks the usual forward-driving narrative, the strictly biographical arc. Instead, she focuses on her mission of raising awareness about the dangers of climate change, and of encouraging those who are resigned to despair to take up the sword again and get in the fight. “Focus”, however, is something of a misstatement; the book is organized into seven principles that she’s developed in the course of her life. These are not strictly rooted in climate change or disaster response, and on the whole are fairly general: “Stay grounded”, “Make haste slowly”, “Live as crew, not passengers”. Each receives a series of reflections drawn from Stott’s life, so despite the lack of an overt biographical focus, the reader who is interested in Stott’s background will pick up details as they progress — including the fact that her father was an amateur pilot who built his own airplanes.

Stott doesn’t launch into a thorough argument about Co2’s effects or human culpability, but instead touches on widespread talking points ranging from the greenhouse effect to water scarcity, while at the same time offering a defense of ISS activity against claims from critics that the money could be spent better elsewhere. The lessons themselves are nice enough, but not penetrating or compelling. While I admire her passion and professional accomplishments, the book left me wanting. I still enjoyed reading it, for her brief stories about the people she’d worked with, her hushed wonder at seeing the Earth from space, and so on, but it never seized my imagination or made me think more deeply or differently about its content.

This book is really great for lovers of space and astronomy. I found it really informative and enlightening. Overall, it's a really great read.

This was an interesting book to read, with some good points and some baffling points made as well.

Since I’m clearly never going to be leaving this planet, I can’t imagine how someone feels once they leave it and look down on earth for the first time. I can only imagine how awe inspiring it is and how it really puts everyday things into perspective.

I think there were some views stated in the book that seemed to be a bit too simplistic, but in all reality, so many people are living day to day in their own bubble of people and events and they don’t necessarily look at the big picture and issues that are facing people all over this planet. So this book gave some food for thought. I didn’t particularly “learn” anything from this book, but it did make you think.

I'm always rather skeptical of conversion stories - someone did something and it opened their eyes to an issue or gave them a new perspective. There's something fundamentally wrong with a society that thinks someone's miraculous conversion somehow imbues them with an authoritative voice or a spiritual gift or something, whereas someone who has seen and been guided by this same revelatory light all their life, rarely gets any credit or any sort of spotlight on their equally valid and majorly contributing 'non-conversion'.

It's entirely wrong; even ass-backwards, but it's how we work on this planet unfortunately. I know authors typically don't write their own book descriptions, so this isn't on her, but the blurb here says "When Nicole Stott first saw Earth from space, she realized how interconnected we are." I'm sorry, but if you have to be shot 250 miles into space at 25,000 mph to realize this, then you've been sleepwalking through life, and you really don't deserve much credit for your epiphany.

I was interested in this book because it seemed to offer a scientific perspective on how we can help Earth, but by a third in I was already disillusioned with it because I'd learned nothing to that end. I'm not saying what I did read wasn't interesting at all; there were parts that were engaging and informative, but none of it had to do with helping fix the problems on Earth.

The story was very autobiographical, with the author calling everyone 'my friend' or 'my dear friend' if she knew them at all, and it carried a sense of desperation to it. It's irrelevant to the reader how close the author is to person A or person B and this constant repetition of that 'friend' mantra had an aura of pathos to it. Not that this is a critical disaster. It just struck me as rather odd in the same way it does when an author writes the more pretentious 'utilizing' instead of simply typing 'using'.

There were parts where the author seemed to start in on a topic and then just abandon it, or go off at a tangent. One example that comes immediately to mind was about painting in space. None of this of course helps save Earth, but I happened to find this particular piece quite fascinating, yet instead of talking about the actual painting she was doing, it seems like she lost interest once the paint was on the brush, and essentially abandoned that story!

In contrast, other tangential stories about life in space or astronaut training seemed like they went on forever or were repeated several times instead of letting the issue go like she did with the art. It made for a messy story overall. These things had nothing whatsoever to do with with applying what had been learned in space to solving Earth's problems, and if all of these extraneous parts had been excised, it would have made for a very thin book indeed. It's like she couldn't make up her mind whether to write an autobiography or an Earth-self-help book, and so we got a disjointed and somewhat repetitive mishmash of both.

The real disaster though, lay in other directions. In the first third of this book, the closest it came to discussing how technology can help Earth, was when discussing the water shortage and how many people are denied a basic human right: access to clean, fresh water. They have filtration units in the space program which take all water - even sweat and urine - and purify it so that it's cleaner than most water you can get on Earth, including that microplastic-infused bottled water that far too many people drink under the delusion that it's healthier than tap water. In some countries I'm sure it is, but that's rarely applicable in the USA. Nowhere in this discussion did the author say how this was applied to helping people on Earth. More on this anon.

The worst part of this section of the story though was that the author mentioned Guy Laliberté. This guy is a Canadian billionaire and gambler who founded Cirque du Soleil, but the latter enterprise, which is multinational (and in which Laliberté has now sold his interests, I understand), was all that got mentioned in the story - that and the fact that Laliberté paid thirty two million dollars to take a space tourist trip. The author talks like this was a deliberate trip to raise awareness of problems on Earth. It was a fail with me, because I never heard of this guy going into space so my awareness was not raised by his $32 million investment. I don't know how many people did hear about it because the author never discusses that.

But here's the thing: this guy paid $32 million!! How many of those problems he claimed he was highlighting could have been solved by putting that $32 million directly into solving them? The author never explored that, and this bothered me. The guy is a billionaire. He could have paid a hundred million to help solve the problems he was raising awareness about and he would never have missed that, yet he's presented in this book as some sort of hero for his work! I don't get that mentality at all.

To me it seems equally likely that he just wanted to take a trip into space and could afford it, which is fine, it's his own money, but then he turns around and tries to 'justify' the extravagance by saying it's an awareness-raising trip. Maybe it was, but who knows? I don't. I just know $32 million went into space and none of that particular amount contributed to bringing "one drop" of clean water to any child. Reading this, I confess I sometimes thought that maybe it's the author's awareness which needs raising?

I was enthralled with the space program when I was a kid, but lately I've wondered more about the PoV of those who ask: why is this money being sent into space when we need help on Earth. I was disappointed in the author's retort to that. It seemed outright facetious to me. She effectively side-stepped the question by redirecting it. She said the money doesn't go into space, it's all spent right here on Earth. That was hilarious, Nicole. Yeah, it's spent on Earth, and a small portion of it goes into setting up experiments in space that can help people on Earth. Thinking people get that. But NASA's space shuttle program cost almost $200 billion in total. Each flight cost $450 million.

So the question, Nicole, is not where the money was spent, but how much value for money we got for that $200 billion. Was it truly worth it? Yeah it was thrilling, but who did it really help? Yeah, there have been concrete returns from the spending, in terms of computer advances and medicine and so on, but where's the evidence that those advances could not have come about by directly investing the $200 billion in technology and medicine?

Did we have to go to space to get these advances? I've never seen a justification for that, and it wasn't discussed in this book. Australia built six seawater desalination plants for ten billion. How many of those would $200 billion buy? Seventy percent of Earth's surface is covered with saltwater and forty percent of the world's population lives within 60 miles of it. Desalination uses a huge amount of energy, but water is most scarce where it's hot, and it's hot because the sun is shining. Can you say solar power?! No alternatives were ever discussed.

I like the space program. Always have, but it needs to be justified, not blown-off with facetious comebacks. In the sixties, robotics, AIs, and computers were pathetic compared with what we have today, but now we do have robots very effectively working on Mars. So what exactly is the justification for sending people into space? I've seen some halfhearted justifications, but never anything that truly made me nod my head in agreement.

Now if everyone had a roof over their head, clothes on their back, food in their belly, clean water, sanitation, and an education in their brain, then by all means blow $200 billion on sending people into space. Until then, there needs to be serious justification for what we spend set against what we can realistically expect to get back from it in temrs of direct benefits to those who most need them. The author never offers any such cost analysis.

The justification needs to be spectacular. it needs to be something that's essential, that can only be done by humans, and that can only be done in space, otherwise it's simply not justifiable when people are starving and suffering, and homeless, and living in migrant camps and being recruited into under-age armies, and drinking disgusting water, and suffering diseases. Anyone with a functioning mind can see that with ever having to go into space.

It needs to be spectacular because, as the author explains, it costs dramatically more money to send a living thing into space than ever it does a robot. It costs more because humans have to be coddled as the author makes quite clear. They're not evolved to live in space, with little gravity tugging on them, and with the brutal cold, the radiation, and a complete vacuum. That's where a heck of a lot of the money goes: into coddling people who are out of their depth - or height in this case! The question that really needs to be asked is: can automation and even robots do the same work that's being done? This question isn't explored in this book either.

Don't tell me it can't be done. It used to be that to fight an air war you needed trained pilots in expensive aircraft - aircraft also designed to coddle humans. Now we have drones doing a lot of that work. I'm not saying it's great, or even justifiable, but it is being done. So you can't tell me that we couldn't achieve the same thing in space - not when we're already doing it, for example, on Mars right now.

But the thrust of this book is about how we can learn lessons from space that we can employ on Earth and the first of these seems to be that we can purify water, but the fact is that the Bill Gates foundation funds the development of waste processing facilities that can be deployed in countries with little infrastructure, and which will handle waste from 100,000 people, producing up to 86,000 liters of potable water a day and a net 250 kw of electricity. None of this came from space exploration. It came from human ingenuity and a challenge to solve a problem. Bill Gates has never been into space and neither - to my knowledge - have any of the people who developed this system. The investment was spent right here on Earth and is already solving problems.

So that brings us back to what this book has to offer in terms of learning lessons from space? The amusing book description has it that the author knows we can overcome differences to address global issues, because she saw this every day on the International Space Station, but this is such a simplistic view of things that it's laughable. The people who are selected to go into space have to pass a barrage of tests and psychological considerations. They're not regular people!

They're purposefully selected for tolerance and sociability and education level and so on! To pretend you can extrapolate from this highly-managed microcosm of Earth's population to the world at large is to show a disturbing level of ignorance about how people are in real life, especially people who are stressed, and deprived, and poorly educated, and poor, and tired, and sick, and hungry. You can't take the harmony of that micro environment and expect it to translate to a world where 74 million people willingly and freely voted for an asshole like Donald Trump. It doesn't work.

At one point I read, “I’m pleased that today we recognize the value of international partnership and cooperation and don’t focus so much on competition." Has the author met China? It's home home to almost a third of the human race which is having nothing to do with the ISS, and is going its own sweet way in space and on Earth. At another point I read, that Earth’s oceans will boil in a billion years, but it's not that simple.

Yes, in a Billion years our climate will change due to changes in solar output, but the oceans and not going to instantly boil away at that point! it will be a slow change, but slowly accelerating as the sun increases its brilliance and eventually, its size. But a billion years from now it won't matter because humans will either be extinct through our own willful scientific ignorance (Republicans I;m looking at you), or have moved off Earth onto other planets. So again, this seemed inapplicable.

So, in short, I cannot commend a book that so dissipated its resources, and so consistently failed to meet its own aims.