Fun Fact About Me: I was on the last team to go on the Civilian Space Station. They didn’t let just anyone on, you know. It isn’t just money that gets you on, though—okay, fine—most of the people who got on there in the two years the thing was up and running were billionaires. But I was the exception. I had written an essay as a college student about space travel and it won. I was invited to Space Infinity’s headquarters for a tour and space tests. That was supposed to be it—some simulations, try the tests the astronauts for NASA had to do (and that the Space Infinity clients supposedly had to do), eat some space food with the crew, all while the press videoed and photographed. But then, you know, there was all this pushback about only the rich going to space when Hal Northrup kept saying stuff like As CEO of Space Infinity, I want to make space travel as normal as getting on a plane. So he decided to silence the naysayers and put me on the CSS.
I’d already done the tests, you see, so they knew I could handle it. I remember how my breath was jagged with anxiety as I sat with one of the crew, and waited for liftoff. It was uneventful, if a little uncomfortable—it was like being on the Gravitron. Once we passed the Karman line it felt like a pile of bricks had been lifted from my body.
But twelve hours after we made it onto the CSS, we had to come down. I had a few hours to see space and the view of Earth as a planet. Things were already a little tense on board when we got there. After we docked and got in, one of the staff showed me around.
I got the feeling they were putting me somewhere to stay out of the way. The voices I heard either nearby (well, everything was nearby there) or in radio transmissions sounded very strained. The fuck was that asshole thinking was one thing I heard and it wasn’t until later that I realized they were talking about the decision to send me up.
Anyway, it didn’t matter. We started to evacuate twelve hours later. There was too much debris outside. It was too much of a risk. I found out later that Northrup was insisting on keeping everyone up there—Most of that debris is tiny, stop being worried about specks of dust and all that—but I guess a Senator called him and said that if he wanted the aid package for his next project, he’d pull me and the crew out.
Fun Fact About Me: I wrote an essay that ultimately got me to space. I’m surprised I won, given what I wrote. I was a literature major and my boyfriend at the time was an engineering major. We broke up shortly after I came back. The way he talked, you’d think that humans would conquer everything, would be rational in all decisions. I just had to point out the mess that was COVID to set him off and then he’d say that actually, people were right to be skeptical and then I’d stop listening to him. He was certain that everyone would make perfectly rational decisions and if you pointed out examples where they didn’t, he’d spin it to himself that they were, in fact, rational. The only person who wasn’t rational was, apparently, me.
He talked a lot about spaceflight and colonizing other planets. “We won’t have to worry about climate change once we colonize Mars,” he’d say a lot. He’d talk about other potential Earths we’d been finding, hundreds of thousands of light years away, and the survival of the species. One of the times he called me irrational was when I asked him how we’d deal with the bacteria and the plant compounds on a planet we hadn’t evolved on. What if the plants that the creatures there could eat would kill us? What if there were bacteria there that wouldn’t harm anything that evolved there but would kill us? I know the story of War of the Worlds, for God’s sake. And by the time I got to the effects of higher or lower gravity on our bodies, he was rolling his eyes and talking over me more loudly than usual. He told me I was being irrational and pessimistic. “We always find a way,” he said.
My essay wasn’t about the glories of colonizing planets or how we will conquer the universe. It was quite the opposite. I talked about how colonizing every known planet would still leave us in an unspeakably small part of the universe, that if we paid attention, we would be humbled. That the smallest things can take us down. That that mightiest warlord, the largest and fiercest animal was nothing in the great infinity of the universe. Out there, there are probably so many beings like us, striving and convincing themselves they will overcome all, colonize everything they see. But like us, they are taking up a tiny corner, a few inches in a place that has infinite inches. We are finite beings in a place that is forever.
It definitely veered into philosophy, and I will admit I wrote it at my boyfriend. But it also won. I think, looking back, Northrup wanted to show me that I was wrong. He ended up showing me I was right.
Fun Fact About Me: I peed into a funnel, which literally sucks. There is a vacuum to collect it. They recycle urine and turn it back into potable water. This makes sense but after hearing Today’s coffee is tomorrow’s coffee and knowing what that meant. . . I didn’t drink the coffee. They collected the poop and when they got enough, shot it towards the Earth’s atmosphere, where it burned up. So yes, we are basically monkeys throwing poo. Suck it, Hal.
The bathroom was based off of the one on the ISS, which had been reconfigured in 2018 for 23 million dollars. It was even more difficult and less comfortable before. So for $23 million, you could anchor yourself with handholds or footholds, and either pee into a vacuum funnel or poop into a vacuum chute. Good times, good times.
Did you know that mission control told the first American in space to just pee in his pants? Alan Shepherd wasn’t supposed to be up for long, so the ship didn’t have a bathroom. But the launch was delayed and he asked if he could leave the rocket to pee. After conferring among themselves, the engineers at mission control told him it was safe for him to pee in his pants. And while rationally you may be able to do that, can you actually do that? I am not sure that I could. I guess astronauts on spacewalks wear diapers because they can’t do their business easily otherwise.
Just think about that. In any movie featuring aliens, remember that at some point, some of those space faring conquerors probably had to pee themselves, and probably threw their poop at their own planet.
Fun Fact About Me: I saw Earth from space. I just stared at it for a while. We were circling around it, and went from the daylight side, all blue with clouds, with seas and brown and green expanses of land, to the nighttime side where lights twinkle from the buildings below.
Somewhere down there was my family. My mother, who said she couldn’t stop me but she wouldn’t rest easy until I was home safely. My dad, who was probably building something in the workshop because when he’s anxious he builds things. My sister, who was probably at soccer practice or pretending to study for her trig exam. And then I thought of all the families down there. The mothers and fathers, the siblings, the children. In houses, in apartments, in tents, on the street. Working, sleeping, reading, writing, eating, killing each other. All of us stuck on the surface, under the haze of the things we burn.
Elena, one of the staff up for a six-month rotation, pointed out Los Angeles. There was a smog cloud over the bottom half of California. She showed me the wildfires. “My family’s there, but so far, they are okay,” she said.
Sometimes I’d see something tiny float past—a piece of a disused booster, debris from a demolished satellite. Elena said there are something like 10 million pieces of debris the size of a marble or smaller and they can do as much damage to a ship as a plasma ray. I must have looked alarmed because she said, “But I’m sure we’ll be fine.”
The Earth is so huge. Each of us is just like a speck of dust on it. Yet there are billions of these specks, making our presence known. I tried to think of each and every speck, every ant-like person but they were so distant. For a moment, I imagined what it would be like to be an alien coming here. It seemed unfamiliar, beautiful, strange. Unlike anything I’d seen. What are these creatures?
Fun Fact About Me: For a moment up there, I thought about what it would be like to do a spacewalk. I wasn’t cleared for that, and even if I was, the crew was too nervous about the debris. But I thought about it and pictured untethering myself and floating out into space, away from Earth, away from everything. Being part of the void.
Fun Fact About Me: Your storage options in weightlessness expand quite a lot. Everything has to be strapped in but there is no floor, no ceiling. Everything is a wall when you’re floating.
Fun Fact About Me: Weightlessness is fun for like five minutes but it gets old fast.
Fun Fact About Me: I told Elena that people are “dumb fucking monkeys” and she laughed. In my defense, it was after they had to come in from doing maintenance because of a debris event, and it was dumb fucking monkeys like us that thought the debris wasn’t enough of a big deal to worry about now.
Fun Fact About Me: I met someone on the CSS who made sense when he talked about why he wanted to travel in space. It was during a lull between debris events. His name was Enzokuhle. He was from New Jersey. “I think it would be so cool to see what’s out there,” he said. “I want to see what other intelligent life there is, and how they live.”
He didn’t tell me I was being a downer or irrational when I asked him about different gravity or microflora and different fauna. He said I was right. “This is our home,” he said, nodding towards Earth. “We don’t know how we’d fare on other planets. We don’t know what even a slight change in gravity would do long term. We don’t know about the bacteria on other planets or the compounds in the plants. We don’t know what would be edible. Hell, being in weightlessness for a long time can do a number on you.”
“Will I be affected?” I asked him.
He patted my shoulder. “Nah, you won’t be here long enough.”
Fun Fact About Me: I really hate litterbugs. Like, I hate them. Just throw it in the trash, for Christ’s sake. Or if it’s too big or too hazardous for that, figure out how to dispose of it. If you can’t do that, you have no business creating and using the thing to begin with.
Fun Fact About Me: I was on TV. As part of my trip to the CSS they wanted to film my reactions to things—like a mini-documentary. The clips were all over the internet. There’s an infamous clip of me looking out as Enzokuhle showed me the northern lights. Then, Elana’s voice: “Put that thing down. We have to evacuate right now.”
I looked up and my face was a study in regret. I should not be here, I remember thinking. There were memes of me all over the internet after. I stayed off social media for a very long time once I saw that popping up.
They put me in another part of the station and had me get into a vac suit while they prepped things. There I was, sweating and heart hammering, wanting to run but there was nowhere to go and I couldn’t run in weightlessness. Enzokuhle checked on me every so often and tell me everything was going to be okay. I heard people yelling. I heard Elena curse. “You arrogant motherfucker, we come down or we may die. Your show pony will fucking die.”
Enzokhule, another crew member, and I went into the capsule for the long drop home. The rest of the crew would follow.
The rest of the crew never made it.
Fun Fact About Me: I am terrified of small things. Bacteria, viruses, they are killers, you know? Marbles orbiting the planet go at speeds of 30,000 kilometers an hour. When a marble hits something at that speed, it basically vaporizes it.
Fun Fact About Me: Falling to Earth really sucks and I never, ever want to do it again.
Fun Fact About Me: Alan Shepherd is not the only spacefarer who peed himself.
Fun Fact About Me: I went to the memorial service for Elena and the rest of the crew. Enzokuhle was there. I kept telling him that I was sorry and that it was all my fault because I was and it is.
Fun Fact About Me: They couldn’t get the second capsule up in time. I saw the coverage and I still have nightmares.
Fun Fact About Me: There was a documentary that came out around the time I went up. It was called Debris Fields. It was about the very thing the crew had been dealing with. I watched it a month after I came down. I am amazed at how things happen that don’t get any notice and turn out to be very big in hindsight. Years before I went up, a defunct satellite was destroyed. It didn’t make the news because it’s kind of a common thing. But then a year after that, the debris hit a couple more satellites. That generated some articles and short news segments as something we had to watch out for, prepare for. Debris Fields talked about the hazards of our trash up there. One of those hazards was a tsunami event, where more and more debris would take out more and more satellites. What happened while I was up there wasn’t a tsunami event. That came shortly after, while the rest of the crew were waiting to come down.
Before that, the mantra was: We'll figure it out, we are innovative, isn’t humanity swell?
We did not, in fact, figure it out.
Fun Fact About Me: I look up at the sky and see all the pieces flying so fast, and know there are more that I cannot see. It’s our prison now. I am among a handful of surviving people who went up and came down. I think of Elena up there. I think of the crew. They are dead because of me. I think of Earth, and how it looked so far away. I think of aliens coming here and being unable to land. Maybe they aren’t coming because they have their own debris fields.
I think of us, trapped here.
I think of other planets and how it’s fortunate for them and whatever is alive on them that we cannot make it off this rock and out there.
Fun Fact About Me: I have a set of shelves that my Dad built for me while I was up on the CSS.
Fun Fact About Me: I have been obsessed with reading books that take place in the 1970’s since we are all now living like people did then.
Fun Fact About Me: I sometimes fantasize that a great plague wipes us all out. That we die in obscurity and darkness, with the trash circling this planet as our legacy and a warning to keep all others away from us.
Fun Fact About Me: I don’t know why I keep writing about this. I want to forget about this.
Fun Fact About Me: In college, I learned Old English to read Beowulf and can speak it with my fellow nerds.
Pamela McCarthy spends her days working in healthcare fundraising and her nights writing short fiction. When she is not working, writing, or reading, you can find her buying seeds for her garden or creating more garden space because she bought so many seeds.