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This is Science Friday.

I'm Flor Lichten.

As promised, we have a special extended cup for you.

Today on the podcast, a conversation about experiencing versus imagining

life and space. I kept wondering, are my imaginative capacities going to be enough to escape

the prism of my own non-astronautness? From Earth, living on the International Space Station can seem, I don't know, kind of magical.

Floating through the day, the view out your window is stunning.

You're having this experience only a handful of other people will ever get.

But what's it really like?

How does experiencing 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every day change your

perception of time? How do you cope with being so far from the people that you love? These are

some of the questions explored in the new novel, Orbital, which won the Booker Prize late last year.

The author Samantha Harvey imagines the inner life of astronauts aboard the ISS,

which is why I really wanted to put Samantha in conversation with an astronaut who lived that life.

So today we have novelist Samantha Harvey, along with astronaut Katie Coleman.

Katie spent almost six months on the International Space Station and is an author herself. She's joining us from New England Public Media in Emmerst, Massachusetts. I am so thrilled to have you both on to talk about this book and life in space. Welcome to Science Friday. Hi, hi, Flora. Hi, Katie. So nice to be here. Do you two know each other?

I feel like we do. And yet we actually just met at an interview before Christmas, you know, over the airwaves, so to speak. And I already wanted to be friends. In fact, I thought we already were just from reading the book.

I really, this is the highlight of my career. I must say that an astronaut wants to be my friend.

Samantha, why the ISS? Why this subject?

Well, you know, I wanted really to write about the Earth more than about space

at the beginning. I wanted to write something like a pastoral novel, something that was about

...