The astronaut told us he didn’t look out the window for eight and a half minutes as the rocket launched him beyond our atmosphere. Terrifying things happened— ground vanished, boosters exploded, day became night—and he did not look. He was focusing, he said, on his job.

He was up there a long time. He learned to sleep suspended. He learned how the sunrise looks when you watch it every morning from the soft dark mouth of space. Many things, he told us, were different than he’d once expected. There’s no space ice cream, he said. That’s a big hoax. His vision blurred. His body became a study: blood, appetite, cognitive function.

He took many pictures. All of them were beautiful. None of them showed what it was like to float.

When the astronaut returned to earth, more tests were run. Scientists discovered that seven percent of his genes had changed in space. He left the planet as himself. He came back as himself, rearranged.