Memoirs of returned astronauts are a very niche type of book, and I’ve enjoyed all the ones I’ve read. This one confirmed that trend for me. Nicole Stott was an astronaut and engineer with NASA for 27 years. The book itself was less focused on her life than I had expected, but I wasn’t disappointed with what I got. She writes with such passion about what is important to her, and you can tell she enjoys sharing and teaching.

The book has seven sections, each focused on a lesson that she’s come to understand over the course of her life and career. These lessons are about the interconnected quality of life on Earth and what we can do to take care of our planet. I would have liked more descriptions on how the experiments on the ISS work to improve life on earth. We get brief mentions of these, but I wanted a lot more.

There were a couple drawbacks for me. Her point of view felt very narrow, even as she promotes global cooperation. Another issue I felt was that a lot of her steps to taking care of our earth were “treat the symptoms” focused instead of addressing root causes. There’s a lot of praise for charities and organizations and their actions, but no serious calling out of the structural problems of colonization or loosening environmental regulations. It felt like the lectures in elementary school in a drought hit area about turning off the water while brushing your teeth at the same time that golf courses in the USA use billions of gallons of water daily to keep the grass green.

In short, this is a good starting point for anyone becoming interested in exploring environmentalism and conservation. But it’s only a first step.

Space is an interesting concept to me, so when someone who's been there writes about it I'm always interested. I enjoyed the way Ms. Stott writes and it left me really thinking.

Writing a memoir of any kind is hard. When you set yourself the challenge of using your experience as one of the few humans who have “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” to teach us about ecological awareness, the bar rises further. Back to Earth has a certain kind of charm to its optimistic idea that orbiting the planet helps you feel like we’re all in this together. Maybe I’m just getting pessimistic at the ripe old age of 32, but this book didn’t quite work for me. Then again, it’s entirely possible I’m just not Nicole Stott’s target audience.

Thanks to NetGalley and Perseus Books for the eARC in exchange for a review.

I don’t mind Stott’s premise—it’s neat! I agree that seeing our planet from space should make us feel more connected. We should think more about ecosystems, about the water cycle, about the importance of bug species. So for Stott to spend some time devoted to these issues, while also talking about what life is like in space, is a good things. I think there is an audience for this book who will love it, so don’t read this review as a critique of the book’s very existence.

With that being said, there was something that rankled me as I read this book. It took me a while to realize what it is: Stott has a very white, very American, very individualist idea of progressiveness. She happily acknowledges injustices in the world like millions of people who don’t have access to clean drinking water. But she spends a lot of time praising the activities of people like Scott Harrison, who founded charity: water, rather than engaging with the underlying reasons why people don’t have clean drinking water (for example, here in Canada it’s because of ongoing colonialism and a federal government that is entirely performative in its reconciliation with Indigenous peoples). Similarly, Stott explores the mechanisms behind climate change and goes so far as to acknowledge that companies and countries both need to cut emissions—we are all in this together, she exhorts—yet she always returns to what we as individuals should be doing.

(The whiteness continues with a bizarre editorial decision to name one of the chapters “Respect the Thin Blue Line.” It’s referring to the Earth’s atmosphere, but the resonance with the slogan for the pro-police, anti-Black Blue Lives Matter movement did not escape me. Read the room, editors.)

I get it. The book is meant to inspire readers (who are probably far younger than myself) to take action. And the best way to do that is to talk about what concrete actions you can take as an individual. However, this can flatten the complexity of these problems and perpetuate a narrative of individualism that is counter-productive to real change.

In recent months, multiple billionaires have gone to space (or not quite, depending on the definition of “space” that you use). It hasn’t inspired any miraculous transformations of conscience on the part of these people. They still have their billions, and our system is still capitalist and corrupt. Going to space does not automatically change people for the better or create feelings of unity and solidarity.

Back to Earth attempts valiantly to draw parallels between issues of environmental justice. Yet it’s clumsy and misses the mark because its focus is too myopic. Stott wants us to care about the planet, and by extension, all the people and creatures on it. This format is fine on the surface, and I believe it is possible to read this book in a surface-level way. There is a lot of good information you could learn from this; I enjoyed reading about the successful attempts to ban chlorofluorocarbons. Alas, I am also somewhat tired of books that come close to getting to the root of these problems yet ultimately don’t engage with them. I’m sure Stott has her reasons. Maybe she feels like it isn’t her place, like her role as an ex-astronaut is to inspire rather than share an opinion she might view as uninformed. Maybe she just wanted to write something conscious yet also light. I can get behind that. But it isn’t what I wanted to read.

A staple of astronaut memoirs is the attempt to communicate the near-religious experience of seeing the Earth from space for the first time, a moment which no picture (authors like Massimino aver) can really capture. Earth appears both beyond momentous and achingly vulnerable, its billions of human lives protected only by the thinnest whisp of an atmosphere. Nicola Scott makes the implications of that fragile image her theme, musing on lessons that her work in NASA, and particularly her time abroad the shuttles and the station, have taught her.

Across three shuttle missions and two ISS expeditions, Stott has lived well over a hundred days in space. Life aboard the Station, where only a thin skin of metal protected Stott and her crewmates from death, where their resources were scarce and closely monitored, and everyone out of necessity shouldered responsibility for their common fate, made her doubly aware of the importance of stewardship once back to Earth. Stott’s memoir of her time in space is unusual in that it lacks the usual forward-driving narrative, the strictly biographical arc. Instead, she focuses on her mission of raising awareness about the dangers of climate change, and of encouraging those who are resigned to despair to take up the sword again and get in the fight. “Focus”, however, is something of a misstatement; the book is organized into seven principles that she’s developed in the course of her life. These are not strictly rooted in climate change or disaster response, and on the whole are fairly general: “Stay grounded”, “Make haste slowly”, “Live as crew, not passengers”. Each receives a series of reflections drawn from Stott’s life, so despite the lack of an overt biographical focus, the reader who is interested in Stott’s background will pick up details as they progress — including the fact that her father was an amateur pilot who built his own airplanes.

Stott doesn’t launch into a thorough argument about Co2’s effects or human culpability, but instead touches on widespread talking points ranging from the greenhouse effect to water scarcity, while at the same time offering a defense of ISS activity against claims from critics that the money could be spent better elsewhere. The lessons themselves are nice enough, but not penetrating or compelling. While I admire her passion and professional accomplishments, the book left me wanting. I still enjoyed reading it, for her brief stories about the people she’d worked with, her hushed wonder at seeing the Earth from space, and so on, but it never seized my imagination or made me think more deeply or differently about its content.

This book is really great for lovers of space and astronomy. I found it really informative and enlightening. Overall, it's a really great read.

This was an interesting book to read, with some good points and some baffling points made as well.

Since I’m clearly never going to be leaving this planet, I can’t imagine how someone feels once they leave it and look down on earth for the first time. I can only imagine how awe inspiring it is and how it really puts everyday things into perspective.

I think there were some views stated in the book that seemed to be a bit too simplistic, but in all reality, so many people are living day to day in their own bubble of people and events and they don’t necessarily look at the big picture and issues that are facing people all over this planet. So this book gave some food for thought. I didn’t particularly “learn” anything from this book, but it did make you think.