Orbital

Roman attempts to speak to a person named Tony on the packet radio. The signal makes it difficult for them to hear each other.

The Voyager probes continue their endless journey into outer space, each one containing an identical golden record of audio produced on Earth. Sometime in the next thousand or even billion years, the probes could be found by some form of intelligent life, who will be able to interpret the records as signs of human civilization. The odds of this are presented as being unlikely. The novel questions whether that intelligent species will be able to make sense of the audio and offers the audio of a woman’s brainwaves as an example. The audio will not help the listener know, for instance, that the woman was in love.

The station crew watches the lunar mission break through the Earth’s atmosphere. They imagine the mission crew’s last day on Earth, from the moment they woke up to the moment they entered their space shuttle. Privately, the lunar crew had been anxious about their impending mission. Once they got out in public, they were glamorized by the press.