International Space Station

The International Space Station is the orbiting workplace that first shaped Sully’s ambitions as an astronaut and, years later, becomes Aether’s destination at the end of its voyage. Designed to receive Aether as a permanent addition, the station promises a return to a known human-made environment. Yet when the crew arrives, it is unoccupied and silent: docking brings them within reach of Earth, but not of an explanation or a safe way down.

Design, Setting, and Connection to Aether

The International Space Station orbits Earth and is central to the original plan for Aether. While Aether’s components were being built on Earth and the spacecraft itself assembled in space, Sully could sometimes see it from the station, its hull catching sunlight at a particular time of day. The distant craft represented a mission that had been planned for years. On completing its journey, Aether was supposed to dock with the International Space Station and remain there as a permanent addition. The station was therefore not an improvised refuge: it was built into the mission’s intended future.

That plan gave the station an unusually personal meaning for Sully. A place in Aether’s crew carried the prospect of taking part in a historic voyage, and astronauts across the program wanted a place on its maiden mission. The International Space Station was where Sully first went to space and where she saw the future spacecraft taking shape. Later, it would be the point at which the crew’s carefully planned journey met the uncertain condition of Earth.

Sully’s First Mission and the Aether Ambition

Sully’s first visit to the station came about twelve years before Aether’s return. She had recently graduated from the astronaut candidate program and spent ten months on a research mission there. She was new to spaceflight but already understood that an Aether crew selection search was beginning. She knew that astronauts sent into space during the selection period might be viewed as auditioning, and she wanted a place on the list intensely. Her experience on the International Space Station confirmed how much she wanted to join Aether.

The decision to pursue that place had consequences beyond Sully’s career. The crew search was announced seven years before the later account, and she received an offer sixteen months afterward. By then she and Jack were living separately, though they had not called their separation a divorce. Sully did not tell Lucy herself that she would be away for more than two years; Jack delivered the news. Sully understood that this spared her a difficult conversation with her only child, even as the choice made the cost of the mission plain. The International Space Station thus belongs not only to the story of her professional preparation but also to the family separation that accompanied her commitment to Aether.

Arrival and Docking

As Aether approached Earth, the crew glimpsed a small light that Ivanov thought might be the International Space Station. The sighting was brief and uncertain, but it made the station tangible before the actual approach. Sully and the others were nearing the endpoint built into their mission plan, even though the circumstances below Earth remained unknown.

Aether eventually entered Earth’s orbit. The crew still intended to dock with the station, as the spacecraft had been designed to do, but the absence of an ISS crew made the procedure difficult and uncertain. Tal prepared the docking controls while Ivanov watched the station through the cupola and followed the approach on the docking camera. The station’s solar arrays and docking port provided visible points of reference as the two spacecraft aligned. The five crew members watched Aether and the station lock together. The successful docking fulfilled a long-standing mission plan, but it did not restore contact with Earth or establish what conditions awaited them there.

An Empty Station and a New Choice

Inside the International Space Station, the signs suggested a place whose occupants had left recently: machines remained on and food packets were still in the kitchen area. Two of its three Soyuz reentry capsules were missing. The equipment seemed archaic beside Aether’s, but the astronauts knew how to use it because each had lived on the station at some point. Familiarity with its systems offered practical help, not answers about what had happened.

Sully inspected the station’s communications equipment and compared its silence with Aether’s. Both were receiving no signals. She kept listening on the frequency where she had previously contacted a man in the Arctic, but he did not answer; eventually she resumed searching for other survivors. The station’s communications capacity did not make it a bridge to the world below. Instead, it extended the same unanswered search into a second spacecraft.

A sweep of the station found neither inhabitants nor clues. The remaining reentry capsule had only three seats for the five Aether crew members. Three could descend to Earth while two remained on the International Space Station, orbiting indefinitely. Neither option was reliably safe: a capsule could land in an ocean or desert without a ground team to retrieve it, and no one knew whether Earth’s air, water, or land remained safe or whether survivors were there. Staying in orbit also meant relying on finite supplies whose duration was uncertain. The crew postponed deciding who would go and who would stay, discussing docking, equipment, and supplies instead. The International Space Station had brought them home in one sense, but its limited return capacity made it the setting for a new separation they could not yet resolve.