Star Trek’s William Shatner, who recently became the world’s eldest space traveler during a Blue Origin New Shepard suborbital flight, was rendered nearly speechless by the view he encountered: “This air which is keeping us alive is thinner than your skin…it would be so important for everybody to have that experience, through one means or another.” Sian Proctor – have created artwork capturing their impressions of their home planet as viewed from space. I had a feeling it’s tiny, it’s shiny, it’s beautiful, it’s home, and it’s fragile.”Ĭover image credit: Multiverse PublishingĪnother astronaut, Apollo 9’s Rusty Schweickart, shared how the experience impacted him: “You realize that on that little blue and white thing there is everything that means anything to you, all history and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love, all of it, on that little spot out there you can cover with your thumb.” Several modern-era astronauts – including Shuttle and International Space Station astronaut Nicole Stott and Inspiration4’s Dr. Collins emphasized, “The thing that really surprised me was that it projected an air of fragility. Apollo 11’s Michael Collins underscored how seeing the Earth from his vantage point orbiting the Moon impressed upon him the utter vulnerability of our home planet. Many astronauts have described the moment as one of their lives' most meaningful moments. But what is the “overview effect”? White defined it as “a profound reaction to viewing the earth from outside its atmosphere.” Its author, Frank White, coined the term “overview effect” during the mid-1980s, and the phrase first entered the public consciousness when the book was initially published in 1987. Gibson’s words are from the book The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution, which is now in its fourth edition and available via Multiverse Publishing. The Earth and space station Skylab viewed by the third crew upon their departure in February 1974.
The result is that you enjoy the life that is before you you don’t sweat so much about the next milestone…It allows you to have inner peace. But you can see that a lot of the things you worry about don’t make much difference in an overall sense. Your life and concerns are important to you, of course. You understand that it is you and the universe…You see how diminutive your life and concerns are compared to other things in the universe.
You feel as though you are a satellite yourself. In no way could we on Earth, or any group of people or any country, consider ourselves isolated we are all in this together… is really the great outdoors. But years later, he would wax poetic when describing his 84 days orbiting the Earth:
Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScIĪstronaut Ed Gibson – selected to NASA in 1965 as an astronaut-scientist, and a solar physicist by trade – wasn’t the type of person to use “flowery” language to describe his experiences indeed, the book he wrote before embarking upon his Skylab mission, called The Quiet Sun, consisted more of post-graduate mathematical equations than poetic treatises about our nearest star. Stephan's Quintet imaged by the James Webb Space Telescope.