Irina Bălan's Key Ideas from Orbital
by Samantha Harvey

But it’s a day of five continents and of autumn and spring, glaciers and deserts, wilderness and warzones. In their rotations around the earth in accumulations of light and dark in the baffling arithmetic of thrust and attitude and speed and sensors, the whip-crack of morning arrives every ninety minutes.

But there are no new thoughts. They’re just old thoughts born into new moments - and in these moments is the thought: without that earth we are all finished. We couldn’t survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea.