"When NASA sent astronauts to the moon in the 1960s and 1970s the agency excluded women from the corps, arguing that only military test pilots--a group then made up exclusively of men--had the right stuff. ... Eventually, though, NASA realized its blunder and opened the application process to a wider array of hopefuls, regardless of race or gender. From a candidate pool of 8,000, six elite women were selected in 1978: Sally Ride, Judy Resnik, Anna...

"A singular new novel from Betty Trask Prize-winner Samantha Harvey, Orbital is an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in twenty-four hours. A slender novel of epic power, Orbital deftly snapshots a day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space-not toward the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its...

"Tensions flare in the near future aboard the International Space Station as a conflict breaks out on Earth. Reeling, the US and Russian astronauts receive orders from the ground; take control of the station by any means necessary"--