Astronaut Vitalie is a thought experiment. A thought experiment, as defined by Oxford Languages, is “an assignment carried out only in the imagination.”
When I asked my rocket-scientist father—now in his 90s—what speculative fiction book I should write next, he responded, “How are humans going to survive in space?”
I knew exactly what he meant. Between radiation, the absence of gravity, the lack of oxygen, and the sheer scarcity of everything that nurtures the human form, we remain...