A Call to Action for Earthlings

Nothing prepared Nicole Stott for her first view of Earth from space. “I was overwhelmed,” she says. “I felt awe, and then this connection with gratitude to be looking at our glowing, colorful planet in deep space.”

Stott’s first spaceflight was in 2009 as a flight engineer on the NASA space shuttle to support a three-month International Space Station mission. At the start of that mission, she conducted a nearly seven-hour spacewalk to perform maintenance. “I’ll tell you, a spacewalk, that’s one of the times of my life where I felt the most alone and detached from any other human being,” Stott has said. “But at the same time, I also felt the closest and most connected to humanity.”

Philosophically, Stott says, her “Earthrise moment,” a reference to the 1968 photograph taken by astronaut Bill Ander of the Earth rising over the moon, “changed everything for me.” That experience “was what I wanted to carry back—the awesomeness of the whole idea that we live on a planet. I felt