--- title: Astronaut Ron Garan: The Perspective From Orbit description: A new approach to solving the planet's problems canonical: https://time.com/3714875/garan-orbital-perspective/ author: Jeffrey Kluger article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-02-23T19:59:36.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:59:53.292Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Want to Love Earth More? Leave it for a While og:description: In a new book, astronaut Ron Garan calls for a better approach to making the world a healthier, more peaceable place. og:url: https://time.com/3714875/garan-orbital-perspective/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd693313eacebd289/6987809df887dc01c4e8a43e/earth1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 2048 og:image:height: 1152 og:image:alt: See the borders? That's because there aren't any. og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Want to Love Earth More? Leave it for a While twitter:description: In a new book, astronaut Ron Garan calls for a better approach to making the world a healthier, more peaceable place. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd693313eacebd289/6987809df887dc01c4e8a43e/earth1.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Loving Earth Can Sometimes Require Leaving It > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Inside TIME: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition Inside TIME is one of seven email newsletters published by TIME, the news organization founded in 1923. A closer look at TIME's latest cover and our most compelling stories. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-inside-2026q3/newsletters?i=ef7c0692-7a74-4e42-9560-a77fd143312a&cr=time-nl-inside-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Astronauts Talk to Time About Life Aboard The International Space Station [Watch (HLS stream): Astronauts Talk to Time About Life Aboard The International Space Station](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/TNgMmJJR.m3u8) (9:38)  _Published 2014-07-09. Astronauts Talk About Life Aboard The International Space Station_  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Feb 23, 2015 7:59 PM UTC  See the borders? That's because there aren't any. See the borders? That's because there aren't any. NASA; Getty Images  by [Jeffrey Kluger](https://time.com/author/jeffrey-kluger/)  ## Jeffrey Kluger Editor at Large Feb 23, 2015 7:59 PM UTC It’s a good thing you can’t see human suffering in infrared wavelengths. That kind of pain is something seen in the visible, felt in the viscera. If it showed up in the infrared it would mean that with the right instruments, you could see it from space, and that would change everything. There’s not a person who’s ever left the planet who hasn’t commented on the transcendent beauty of the blue, green, white Earth hanging in what otherwise appears to be a void. But what if Syria glowed scarlet like the open wound it is? What if West Africa went dark and cold to reflect the Ebola deaths that are still happening there? Astronauts are spared such sights—or at least most of them are. But Ron Garan saw them anyway. Garan spent two weeks aboard the space shuttle Discovery and the International Space Station in 2008, then returned to space for a five-and-a-half-month stay aboard the station in 2011\. That last tour of duty included the month of August—most significantly August 24, the day Tripoli fell during the Libyan civil war. Garan happened to look out the window that day and snapped a picture that included Libya—a place that was beautiful from orbit but bleeding up close. The experience, along with many others others like it during the collective 179 days Garan spent in space, changed a great many things for him. Life on Earth, he came to realize, is experienced two-dimensionally—with all of the distortion that that implies. The people and things close to you obscure the ones farther away; objects shrink as they approach the horizon—dwindling in both size and significance. One Ebola death in the U.S. galvanizes our attention. Ten thousand in Africa barely move us. Such a blinkered view is impossible from orbit, where you take in whole sweeps of the borderless globe in a glance. Garan, accordingly, returned home to write a book, [_The Orbital Perspective_](http://www.amazon.com/The-Orbital-Perspective-Lessons-Picture/dp/1626562466), that movingly explains the impact of such a perspective shift—one that by no means occurs for every astronaut. The late Jack Swigert, command module pilot of Apollo 13, once observed that the very things that qualify astronauts to go to space—a mission-first, get-it-done pragmatism that doesn’t allow for a lot of rhapsodic silliness—often disqualifies them to feel or describe their experiences terribly deeply. Garan was the rare exception and is now devoting himself to working for a world that functions the way it appears to function from space—as an organic whole, not a fragmented collection of continents, nations, communities and sects. The book’s foreword is written by Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace prize for pioneering the concept of microloans—making very small amounts of money available to people who would otherwise not qualify for credit so that they can start businesses or otherwise become self-sufficient. A fair bit of the book is devoted to exploring similar kinds of work done by similar kinds of social entrepreneurs. There is Amanda Lindhout, the Canadian journalist who spent 460 days in captivity after being kidnaped by Somali extremists in 2008 and then, after being released, went home to found the Global Enrichment Foundation, in support of education in Somalia. There is Engineers Without Borders (EWB), a group dedicated to bringing solar power, food-preservation systems and other technological essentials to underserved parts of the world. Garan, in fairness, had an inclination toward good works even before he first flew in space—founding the [Manna Energy Foundation](http://www.mannaenergy.org/index.html) to help address the developing world’s need for fresh water, renewable energy, access to communications and other basics. He has since worked with EWB and NASA’s Johnson Space Center to further the group’s work. But his trips to space provided him a certain authority—and urgency—he lacked before. There’s an undeniable wonk appeal to Garan’s approach to the business of saving and improving lives. He finds metaphorical power in a hunk of hardware most people have surely never heard of: the Apollo-Soyuz docking module, an ugly 4,400 lb. (2,000 kg) piece of metal that made the first joint U.S.-Soviet spaceflight possible, in 1975, allowing two incompatible spacecraft—from two incompatible cultures—to link-up in orbit. He describes the Apollo 13 rescue less as the gripping tale of survival it surely was than as the world’s “first hackathon.” He sees, similarly, more than a feel-good story in the successful international effort to save 33 trapped Chilean miners in 2010\. Instead, he sees it as a template for global cooperation, one that came complete with group cheers and team shirts to foster a feeling of mission and camaraderie among the rescuers. “There have been disasters of similar or greater scale where countries decided to go it alone,” Garan writes, “leading to less desirable outcomes.” Astronauts have a long tradition of going to space and then coming home to write about their adventures. But in those cases, the books generally explore what the astronauts themselves saw and felt and did and how they put those lessons to use later in life. In Garan’s case—and perhaps Garan’s alone—the message is how the rest of us can put his lessons to use. _The Orbital Perspective_ may not be the most cinematic tale ever told from space, but it could wind up being the most important. ## Transcript We're at the Time studios in Midtown Manhattan, and right about now, the International Space Station is 230 miles overhead, passing by at 17, 500 miles per hour. In a moment, we'll be chatting live with three of the station six crew members, Commander Steve Swanson, and Flight Engineer Reid Wiseman of NASA as well as Flight Engineer Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency. Well thank you for being with us today, and I wanted to just jump right in and ask you what time did you guys punch in for work this morning and what does the day ahead look like? We started about 7: 30 this morning, and the rest of the day is various things. You have science. Science. I have some repairs to do. What do you have today Alex? I have several little science experiments already today. And I think for the rest of the day, we have a training event for the new cargo vehicle we expect, orbital, that's coming in the next two weeks, so we're actually gonna use the station manipulator to do some practice grapple with it. And then, in the evening, I think I have a little bit more science experience. So it's a, quite various varied day. It's, it's pretty nice. So it's about a 12 hour day? Yeah, when you include the working out we have to do, it's about a 12 hour day. And Reid, this one's for you. You've been a big presence on Twitter and social media, something the astronauts of the Apollo era never had to think about. So how do, how do you see the astronaut's job changing over the decades? Well, I think the astronauts have always wanted to share their journey with as many people as possible, and I think Apollo with the tools they had they did a phenomenal job. We're just looking to live in this day where, you know, I take a photograph with a with a camera and we just come back and we can email it straight into our Twitter feed and it just does, it makes it so much easier to share this experience. And so, it's almost just become a little collateral duty of ours. So you don't even think about it through the day. It's so easy but it's appreciated, and we really enjoy doing it. And you're keeping in touch with the world that way, but how do you keep in touch with your families? You're gone for a long time. Yeah. We're gone for about five and a half to six months. And NASA does a great job of helping us keep in touch with our families. So, once a week we actually get to do a fairly short video conference. So, I've been talking to my wife and kids. I even had one with my mom and dad. So, that's really been fantastic and that kind of support is really special for us up here and really, really increases the moral on the weekends. And are you able to email back and forth, or is that just not available? No we had the chance of emailing pretty much the whole day. Once in a whole if we have two minutes between two experiments, we can go to our computer stations and then just send an email and receive. So actually I feel more in touch with my family right now than I did during most of the training because my family lives in Europe and the, the time distance from Houston is actually quite uncomfortable to have a telephone conversation because it's either early in the morning for one party. So up here for me it's easier. That's sort of remarkable I think. This one's for Alex. Congratulations on yesterday's World Cup score. And how well have you been able to follow Germany's deep run to the final round? We, we were actually pretty lucky that most of the games happen during the evening hours that we had here so after our work was done we got some live feed actually from mission control in Houston. So, that's never guaranteed and it only works when we have some bandwidth left, but we were pretty lucky. So, most of the games of the US and Germany, we, we saw live and that, that was, of course, a, a good treat for us. And there were a lot of wows yesterday as you'd imagine. [ LAUGH ]. I would imagine, down on Earth too. And speaking of the World Cup, Steve, it was mostly fun and games when Germany beat the US in the first round, but the recent US Russian friction over Ukraine is a far more serious matter. And the other three members of your crew are Russian cosmonauts. Does that kind of thing ever present a problem in the close quarters of a space station? No it does not. We've become good friends with our Russian colleagues. We've trained with them for a long time. We've been up here with them for a long time and that kind of issues don't arise for us. It doesn't cause any kind of friction. And I imagine the fact that you look out the window and you see no borders visible from space makes it gives you a whole different perspective on things. Yes, it does. As I've sorted out. We also watched the Russia or the soccer games together. So that kind of bonds us together, too. Absolutely. We've got a handful of questions from some of our readers. This one comes from a young reader named Luke who wants to know, what do you miss most from Earth? Again, you're up there for a long time. It's the simple things that I think you miss most. For me personally I miss a shower, a nice warm shower in the morning. If we could get that going up here, wow, that would be something really, really super. But for now that's the number one thing. I did see, I did see on a TV show a couple days ago, a family sat down and had a big pizza with a soda and, man [ LAUGH ] I was, at that point I was missing pizza a little bit more than the than the shower, but overall that's where we are. We actually did get three pizza questions from readers so they were right on the money there. From some of our, our photography fans who read time, what cameras do you use? And are there limitations on what cameras can be used in space? Can you just use an iPhone to take a picture up there? Well, you could take an iPhone, but of course what we see out the window, it's so beautiful that we need something with a little bit more resolution. So we have like professional SLR cameras. Also the lenses, sometimes, like if you wanna, take a picture of a typhoon or a hurricane you need a wide angle lens. So and then if you want to take a picture of your hometown you have this huge 800 millimeter lens and you can actually see houses, individual houses and. It's pretty amazing what you can do. And also, it's amazing to see what the caustic radiation does. Like we really have to use up these cameras. Like they only last for a half a year or a year. And then, the, the pixel damage through caustic radiation is so big that we actually bring up new ones. And I imagine the view of the nighttime sky, or it's always a nighttime sky, of course, is radically different with no atmospheric interference. That is true. The stars do not twinkle up here. They just are pin points. And there're so many of 'em. It's so beautiful. Where do you go for privacy? The station as much habitable space as, I think, a 747 and yet, that's all the space you've got. Do you ever find that you need a place to retreat and get a little time alone? You know, working with these guys, I'd almost say no. It's [ LAUGH ] it's always a good, it's always good fun. But we each actually do have, we each actually have our own little bedroom that's about the size of a telephone booth. So it could fit about you and we have two laptops in there that connect with the outside world. But really it's pretty comfortable and we treat those with the highest level of respect. So, my bedroom is my room and and that's my little place to go if I need some privacy, but to date, I mean it's really just been a sleeping quarters. Most of the time we're out here socializing, inviting our Russian crew members down or heading down to see them in the evenings and really it's, it's a good community living situation. And speaking of sleeping, do you dream differently in space? Is there something about the experience unconsciously knowing where you are that changes the way you experience dreams? Actually, I've been asked that question a lot and I, I, in the first weeks I never remembered my dreams. But I did have one dream that I remembered last week and that was actually with, with Reid launching on a rocket from Canada to fly to [ UNKNOWN ] from where we mounted that rocket onto a [ UNKNOWN ] and then flew to space. That I thought that was a pretty remarkable deed. [ LAUGH ] I'm wondering, another thing I notice at night, is actually that I sometimes, I wake up at night and I don't know where up and down is. Of course there's no up and down, and I believe that in that moment I think I'm head down or some way turned around, but then I switch on the light and I realize that I'm actually completely normal. So that happened to me quite a few times and I actually did hear that happens to, to other people once in awhile as well. And I'm sure there are lots of good days in space. What's the toughest day you've had out there. A day you were just happy to see come to an end and go to bed and forget about? There was a day where Alex took some hair clippers and he stood a little to close to me and our Commander Doctor Steve Lawson. And I gotta say I was happy when that day came to an end. [ LAUGH ] And you've got a few months for your hair to grow back. So that's good. And I guess this will be our final question. I know you don't get a lot of free time, but when you do have it, how much of that do you spend simply enjoying the view of the Earth outside your window? Almost all of it. That's one of our biggest free time events that we do up here. And then of course we, you always want to take a picture and share it. So then we spend the other part trying to process the pictures and get them down to everybody else. Well that's pretty much all that we do with our free time. Well thank you so much for making the time gentlemen. 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