The Orbital Perspective: Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of 71 Million Miles

THE ORBITAL PERSPECTIVE

On the cover is a photo that my crewmate and space walking partner Mike Fossum took of me while I was in the cupola of the International Space Station. The photo was taken from the Russian docking compartment Pirs as we passed over coastal Australia.

I have always called this picture Downside Up Down Under. Peter Gabriel inspired the name of the photo through the many discussions he and I have had, both on Earth and while I was in space, about the nexus between space, music, culture, and the orbital perspective. Peter’s song Downside Up and his explanation of the song perfectly capture the sentiment of the photo and the essence of the orbital perspective: At one point the world turns upside down, and you have to imagine lying on a field of grass and looking up at the sky long enough that you start to see the sky as down, as an ocean below you, and that is the state ‘downside up.’

Downside up, upside down

Take my weight from the ground

Falling deep in the sky

Slipping in the unknown

All the strangers look like family

All the family looks so strange

The only constant I am sure of

Is this accelerating rate of change

…

I stand here

Watch you spinning

Until I am drawn in

A centripetal force

You pull me in

—PETER GABRIEL

THE ORBITAL PERSPECTIVE

Lessons in Seeing the Big Picture from a Journey of Seventy-One Million Miles

ASTRONAUT

RON GARAN

The Orbital Perspective

Copyright © 2015 by Ronald J. Garan, Jr.

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First Edition

Hardcover print edition ISBN 978-1-62656-246-2

PDF e-book ISBN 978-1-62656-247-9

IDPF e-book ISBN 978-1-62656-248-6

2014-1

Produced and designed by BookMatters; copyedited by Todd Manza; indexed by Leonard

Rosenbaum; proofed by Janet Blake. Cover design by Steve Pisano. Front cover photo by

Mike Fossum and reproduced courtesy of NASA.

To my family: my wife, Carmel, and our sons, Ronnie,

Joseph, and Jake. Thank you for being my inspiration

and for enabling me and accompanying me on this

incredible journey. And to all those laboring to make life

on Earth as beautiful as our planet looks from space.

CONTENTS

Foreword, Muhammad Yunus

Preface

INTRODUCTION A Shift in Perspective

PART I   LOOKING SKYWARD

ONE   Humanity’s Home in the Heavens

TWO  Space, the Shared Frontier

THREE  Lessons in Collaboration from the ISS Program

PART II   LOOKING EARTHWARD

FOUR   One Moment in Space

FIVE     The Orbital Perspective

SIX     The Key Is We

PART III  LOOKING FORWARD

SEVEN     Camp Hope

EIGHT     Arrested Development

NINE        Mass Collaboration

CONCLUSION     A Web of Trust

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author

Color Photos

FOREWORD

As you read of Ron’s discovery of his life’s goal and purpose during his time in space, I hope you will also reflect on your own life’s goal and purpose here on Earth. What are the problems you consider impossible to solve—hunger, poverty, war, environmental issues—and how can you gather together with others to solve these problems? Use Ron’s idea of the orbital perspective as a way to erase obstacles, boundaries, and resistance to any problem.

If you had asked bankers thirty years ago whether a bank could lend billions of dollars to millions of extremely poor women in a country like Bangladesh without any collateral and with nearly a one hundred percent repayment rate, they would have laughed at you! Today, this is done globally—even in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—and is a tested tool to counter poverty and give self-reliance. Another kind of business, a nondividend business, is becoming popular globally to address problems that were never considered amenable to sustainable solutions by business methods. What other tools can you discover if you put your mind and heart into the question?

Ron has shared with us his unlimited view of Earth’s possibilities from the vantage point of the International Space Station. May we use this beautiful perspective for the good of all with whom we share our beautiful home, this fragile oasis known as Earth.

Muhammad Yunus

Nobel Peace Laureate

PREFACE

I have wanted to write this book since returning to Earth from my first space mission in 2008. Launching on Space Shuttle Discovery fulfilled of a lifelong dream of flying in space. It also marked the start of another quest—a quest that would lead me to reject the status quo on our planet, a quest to help reduce the sobering contradiction we see when we look at our planet from space, and a quest to help make life on Earth as beautiful as the visible beauty of this planet when seen from space.

I returned from that mission with a compelling need to share a profound feeling of hope that was singed into my awareness from the experience. I call this awareness the orbital perspective, and this awareness came with a responsibility to highlight the need for effective global collaboration. My goal in writing this book is to spark change—very simple, but exponentially powerful change. I was compelled by a simple idea: our world still faces numerous problems because we have not, to date, learned how to work together. But I believe that the entire landscape of our society is changing, making available powerful collaborative tools that can engage the collective genius of our global society like never before. We are living in times of unprecedented interconnectedness—an interconnectedness that empowered a fruit vendor in Tunisia to spark a collective movement that has changed the world.

We live in a world where exponentially increasing technological advancements and interconnectivity are making the impossible possible on a daily basis. Commonly held beliefs about what’s possible and what’s not are being overcome by events. We do not have to accept that the suffering and conflict on our planet are inescapable. I believe we live in a world where the possibilities are endless and limited only by our imagination and our will to act. The secret to achieving these critical things is to pull back to the point where we can see all the pieces of the puzzle and how they fit together, and where it also becomes apparent that our own backyard is bigger than we think. Our sphere of influence is in fact global. This is the orbital perspective.

I wrote this book to help create a global movement—a movement of inhabitants of this planet, known as humans, who believe that nothing is impossible, who are willing to set aside their differences and work together toward our common goals. I wrote this book to start a global conversation and to spread the awareness that it is no longer acceptable to have a go-it-alone attitude. The problems facing our world are too big, the challenges too critical, and the potential catastrophes too imminent to adhere to the old way of doing things.

We are past the point where any one organization or nation can go it alone and still effect any kind of real course correction to the trajectory of our shared future. The missing link that would bridge the gap between our problems and their solutions is simple to state yet challenging to implement. The answer is collaboration—true collaboration, which I will define and describe throughout this book, not the false collaboration that has become the latest buzzword.

There may be a tendency to discredit my words as overly optimistic or unrealistic. But I understand that, in the end, all governments will make decisions that are in accordance with what they believe to be in their national interest, and that many perverse incentives are stifling progress toward achievement of our goals. My view comes from seeing the worst and best we as a human species have to offer, from visiting the heights of space to working with those in destitute poverty. During my time in combat, I was routinely shot at and experienced the death of squadron mates and friends. I have experienced firsthand and have participated in the horrors that partly define life on this planet. Nonetheless, I remain optimistic that we can rise above the challenges we face.

FRAGILE OASIS

I hope that you find this book entertaining, engaging, and thought-provoking, but if after reading it all you have received is entertainment and a slight shift in perspective, I will have failed. My intention is to communicate a call to action. I am asking everyone to look for ways to create exponential, disruptive, positive action—action that leads to exponential advancement toward solving the challenges facing our world. I do not claim to have all the answers, and I know that there is great complexity in the topics I discuss, but I hope that after reading this book you will agree that we’re on to something big that can potentially change the present trajectory of our global society and put it on a profoundly more positive path.

During and after my first mission, I was somewhat frustrated that I couldn’t share my amazing experience with people as it was happening. So when I next was assigned to a six-month long-duration mission, I looked for a way to share this experience. I wanted to bring people along not just as spectators but as fellow crewmates.

What evolved from that desire is an effort called Fragile Oasis. Initiated with the help of the amazing Elyse David and then supported by NASA’s Beth Beck and others, Fragile Oasis took shape and was launched prior to my mission in 2011. The goal of Fragile Oasis is to use the orbital perspective to inspire people here on Earth to make a difference. As a step in that direction, we have built collaborative tools into the site, which people and organizations can use to work together. We also wanted to identify fellow crewmates on Spaceship Earth who are making a difference. Periodically, we award Fragile Oasis medals, which flew with me in space for more than 65 million miles, in the categories of Peace, Humanitarian Service, Education, and Environment Stewardship.

Fragile Oasis is envisioned as a vehicle to effect real change. We want to provide a means for people and organizations to collaborate and develop synergy toward overcoming our planet’s challenges. We want to encourage people to make a difference and help organizations striving to make the world a better place to reach their goals. Fragile Oasis is still a work in progress, but I am really excited for its potential.

I hope you will tell us about what you’re doing to make a difference. Register your projects on FragileOasis.org so we can help support your efforts. Visit OrbitalPerspective.com, so we can help get the word out. Share your ideas on how we can better work together on UnityNode.org, so that we can better coordinate the efforts of all.

Solving the challenges affecting our planet really depends on how each of us individually responds to them. I am asking you to join us in a global conversation centered on taking a big picture and long-term view. I am asking that you look for ways to combine what you and your organizations, corporations, and governments are doing into better-coordinated, collective efforts and reshape the trajectory of our global society.

INTRODUCTION

A Shift in Perspective

This is a book about perspective—the perspective of seeing our planet from space, the perspective of working on development projects on the ground, and the orbital perspective, which synthesizes them both and is the focus of this book.

There usually are two ways to define the word perspective. It may refer to the rendering or interpretation of a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional plane, or it may refer to an attitude toward something, a point of view. Both of these definitions come into play in our discussion of the orbital perspective. Historically, for the most part, our perspective has been two-dimensional. Although we know that the world is not flat, a true perspective on a three-dimensional, interrelated reality is usually beyond our immediate awareness. Nonetheless, the real world is not two-dimensional, and to solve the problems facing our global society we need to start living in the real world. Two-dimensional thinking focuses on the next quarterly report or election campaign. Three-dimensional thinking, the orbital perspective, brings to the forefront the long-term and global effects of every decision. Two-dimensional thinking prioritizes capturing market share, whereas three-dimensional thinking looks to expand the market itself and does not particularly care who’s got the biggest piece of the pie.

In my development work, I’ve seen how the two-dimensional, short-term approach can sometimes cause even the most well-intentioned efforts to go astray. Take, for instance, the situations encountered by my friend Samantha Snabes, who we will hear more about later. Samantha visited the Mugonero Hospital in western Rwanda, where in 2006 I had helped install solar panels with a combined Manna Energy Foundation / Engineers Without Borders team. While she was there, Samantha encountered an area behind the hospital where a mountain of medical equipment, donated by various organizations, was just sitting out in the elements. These pieces of equipment had either broken because they weren’t designed for the conditions of what is effectively a field hospital, or simply had not matched the needs of the hospital in the first place. This senseless waste left a big impression on Samantha. I see this image in my head almost every night before I go to bed, she said. The director of the hospital told her that nongovernment organizations had come with this equipment, and when it doesn’t work, we can’t fix it, and this is just where we put it until we can figure out what to do with it.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident; it is a situation that repeats itself over and over again. At its core, the problem is a lack of information. Well-meaning people and organizations do not have all the pieces of the puzzle and often make recommendations that are not sustainable. They are operating with a two-dimensional perspective. Without democratized access to information, individuals and groups in developing countries are forced to depend on external as opposed to locally inspired solutions.

Samantha saw a similar disconnect at the L’Esperance orphanage, a short walk from the hospital, and in this case it was particularly troubling because the problem related to agriculture. Subsistence farmers frequently make critical decisions about what type of crop to plant based on limited or incorrect information, and this had a specific impact at L’Esperance. Focused on creating a financially sustainable income for the orphanage through dried tropical fruit exports, and using a bit of agricultural experience from his home in Guatemala, the director had borrowed a plan from someone a few hills over and had invested the orphanage’s limited resources and its workers in planting pineapples and other fruits. There was little consideration of factors such as soil type, rainfall needs, or soil acidity. They literally gained access to a variety of seeds that looked like they might work, so they went ahead and planted them, Samantha said.

Unfortunately, they had planted the wrong type of pineapple for that area of Rwanda, and the crop would not produce sufficient fruit to meet the needs and goals of the orphanage. This is a serious concern for people existing on thin margins. While working in Nicaragua, Samantha observed a number of other situations in which impoverished people lost what little they had by planting the wrong crop, exposing impoverished families to tragedy after they used up their extremely limited resources in the hope of enabling subsistence farming. People’s livelihoods—and at times lives—were being lost due to what boils down to a lack of information.

What Samantha saw in Rwanda, coupled with her experience in Central and South America, solidified her path. I began to think that the best contribution I could make was to support decision-makers at the local level in developing countries by enabling solutions and technologies where people could leverage big data to make informed decisions and develop appropriate solutions, she said. So she set her sights on improving local food production.

A SHIFTING PERSPECTIVE

We all have moments like this in our lives, where something shifts, clicks into place. For me it was in June 2008, when I clamped my feet to the end of the robotic Canadarm2 on the International Space Station (ISS) and was flown through a maneuver that we called the Windshield Wiper, which took me in a long arc above the space station and back. As I approached the top of this arc, it was as if time stood still, and I was flooded with both emotion and awareness. But as I looked down at the Earth—this stunning, fragile oasis, this island that has been given to us, and that has protected all life from the harshness of space—a sadness came over me, and I was hit in the gut with an undeniable, sobering contradiction. In spite