When off-duty, many astronauts float in the cupola watching the vistas scroll below.
“Until the cupola module was added, our only way to see the Earth was through single, portal-like windows,” said Cady Coleman, a NASA astronaut who traveled to the station in 2010. “Your favorite places on Earth would flash by the tiny window so quickly, you couldn’t take them in. But from the middle of this dome, you can watch Earth come and go and feel like a person in your own little spacecraft, with the best window imaginable for looking at our world.”
Especially beautiful were the nighttime views of Earth with the aurora borealis. In the early years, those views were reserved for astronauts, because the rate at which Earth spun past meant that night photos were blurred. But Donald Pettit, a NASA astronaut on the station in 2012, rigged “a barn-door tracker” to be able to send the first crisp photos of our nighttime planet back from the I.S.S.
Those views do not show national borders. Astronauts report feeling a cognitive shift as they watch the fragility of our planet below them, something Ron Garan, a NASA astronaut, calls the “orbital perspective.” It shapes them even after they return to Earth.
A decade after he helped install it, Mr. Virts said, “The cupola is the place where astronauts can connect with our planet and the universe; you realize that you are ‘up here’ and Earth is ‘over there.’ It’s a profound realization, which shapes your perspective on nearly everything.”