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Five episodes across 24 hours on an international space station, six astronauts contemplate the earth, as continents and oceans pass beneath them. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan--have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below. They are there to collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. We are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.


Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of one astronaut's mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part - or protective - of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?


"In this new day they'll circle the earth sixteen times. They'll see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets, sixteen days and sixteen nights. In their rotations around the earth in accumulations of light and dark, in the baffling arithmetic of thrust and altitude and speed and sensors, the whip-crack of morning arrives every ninety minutes".


Written by Samantha Harvey
Abridged by Sara Davies
Read by Anneika Rose
Produced by Mary Ward-Lowery and Mair Bosworth
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2024

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