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TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILES above earth, astronaut Thalia Charles—the American flight engineer on Expedition 18, along with a Russian commander and a French engineer—floated in zero gravity through the vestibule joining the Unity module to the aft hatch of lab mod Destiny. The ISS research facility orbited earth sixteen times each day, or about once every hour and a half, at a speed of seventeen thousand miles per hour. Occultations were no great feat in low earth orbit: blocking the sun with any round object in a window revealed the spectacular corona. Thalia’s interest therefore was not in the alignment of the moon and the sun—from her fast-moving perspective, there was indeed no occultation—but rather the result of this phenomenon upon the slow-rotating earth.

Destiny, the primary research lab on the ISS, measures twenty-eight by fourteen feet—although the interior working space of this cylindrical module, due to the amount of equipment tied down to the squared-off sides, is tighter than that, measuring roughly five humans long by one human across. Every duct, pipe, and wire connection was directly accessible and therefore visible, such that each of Destiny’s four walls looked like the back of a panel-size motherboard. At times Thalia felt like little more than a tiny microprocessor dutifully carrying out computations inside a great space computer.

Thalia walked her hands along the nadir, the “floor” of Destiny—in space there is no up or down—to a broad, lenslike ring studded with bolts. The portal shutter was designed to protect the integrity of the module from micrometeoroids or collisions with orbital debris. She maneuvered her sock-covered feet against a wall grip and manually opened it, revealing the two-foot-diameter optical-quality window.

The blue-white ball of earth came into view.

Thalia’s duty assignment was to point and shoot some earth photos with a hard-mounted Hasselblad camera via remote trigger. But when she first looked out on the planet from her unusual vantage point, what she saw made her shudder. The great black blot that was the shadow of the moon looked like a dead spot on the earth. A dark and threatening flaw in the otherwise healthy blue orb that was home. Most unnerving was that she could see nothing at all within the umbra, the central, darkest part of the moon’s shadow, that entire region disappearing into a black void. It was something like viewing a postdisaster satellite map showing devastation caused by a mighty fire that had consumed New York City, and was now spreading out over a broad patch of the eastern seaboard.