Custodian of the Unplanned: The Unbounded Contingency of Space

The ethos of spaceflight is defined by meticulous planning. Checklists thick as books. Redundancies layered on redundancies. Simulations that rehearse catastrophes until they feel like routine. If any domain can be conquered by preparedness, it should be this one. And yet the defining moments of space exploration often arrive as deviations from plan small, stubborn, and structurally revealing. Space is “infinite” not only because it stretches outward with no end in sight, but also because of the endless manners in which the original plan can take a detour. In orbit, a trivial droplet can become blindness. A short crew flight test can become months of station operations once the ride home stops being the safest option. A nation can dissolve while one of its citizens remains in orbit.

Put differently, space does not follow Earth rules. It strips away the invisible stabilizers that make our world feel predictable - gravity, institutional continuity, and the habit of treating schedules as if they were carved in stone. Space does not merely host surprise. It manufactures it. That is why the most revealing truths about space do not live in mission plans; they surface when those plans break, and that is where this article begins, with three stories from three people, each confronting space’s manufactured surprises in their own ways.

Chris Hadfield - The Man who went blind in space

Chris Hadfield’s first spacewalk in 2001 exposes how quickly the mundane can turn into an operational hazard. During the EVA, he was operating at the most exposed interface of human vulnerability: a pressurized life-support system separating him from vacuum. In that environment, sight is not a convenience; it is a primary sensor for navigation, tool use, and situational awareness.

Source: The Guardian

The disruption was insultingly ordinary: a drop of an oil-and-soap anti-fog mixture (used to prevent the helmet from fogging) got into his eye. The pain triggered tears. But in microgravity, tears do not fall. They pool and linger until the discomfort turns into total sensory loss.

The real contrast is this: on Earth, gravity quietly drains away small failures. It pulls tears down. Settles droplets. Anchors orientation. Gravity is an error corrector we rarely acknowledge. In orbit, that correction disappears, so “minor” anomalies do not dissipate. Space turns a small deviation into a system-level event.

Hadfield’s response matters for what it reveals about competence in the infinite. He did not heroically “wing it.” He reported the issue, followed guidance to help clear the irritant, and managed the contingency procedurally. The lesson is almost anti-romantic: space does not reward fearlessness; it rewards discipline under uncertainty.

The public remembers Hadfield floating through the ISS singing David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’, a crafted image of effortless orbiting calm, still widely available on YouTube. It is a reminder that space can look effortless from Earth, until the plan meets physics.

Sunita Williams: The engineer of staying aloft

If Hadfield shows how space changes the physics of the body, Sunita Williams shows how space changes the physics of decision-making, and how a mission becomes a moving target once deviation begins.

Williams and fellow astronaut Butch Wilmore launched on Boeing’s Starliner Crew Flight Test on June 5, 2024, arriving at the ISS on June 6, 2024, expecting a short-duration mission. Technical problems with the Starliner, however, pushed NASA into a rolling risk assessment where the “plan” stopped being a plan and became a sequence of contingent choices.

On August 24, 2024, NASA made a bold decision: Starliner would return uncrewed, and Williams and Wilmore would return later on a SpaceX Crew Dragon. The logic of the decision was unromantic but necessary: gather data without accepting more crew risk.

Williams’ role during this extended period is nothing but extraordinary. The ISS is built for continuity, but continuity is not passive. It is earned through maintenance schedules, training cycles, and periodic EVAs to keep the station operating safely. During the extended stay, Williams added to her EVA record, eventually surpassing the record for total spacewalking time by a woman (62 hours, 6 minutes), a statistic that matters less as a trophy than as a proxy for repeated exposure to the hardest category of on-orbit work.

This achievement was not about endurance for its own sake; it was about operational stewardship - keeping a complex system stable while the return pathway is being renegotiated in real time. In that sense, she becomes the human face of continuity: the person who absorbs uncertainty so the system can keep functioning. But what happens when the institution doing that risk management on the ground ceases to exist? That is where the story of Sergei Krikalev begins.

Sergei Krikalev - The last Soviet citizen

Sergei Krikalev’s story extends the same logic into geopolitics, showing that what fails in space is not just the body’s intuition or the schedule’s promise, but the assumption that political order is continuous. In May 1991, Krikalev left Earth for the Mir space station as a citizen of the Soviet Union. When he returned in March 1992, that country no longer existed.

Krikalev was in space when the Soviet Union was dissolved in late December 1991. However, space does not accommodate abrupt institutional failure on Earth. Orbital platforms require continuous funding, expertise, communication, and maintenance. When the Soviet Union collapsed, ministries vanished and command structures fractured. But Mir remained aloft. Space does not pause for revolutions.

Source: NASA

Krikalev’s extended stay was not a heroic improvisation; it was the only feasible option under tremendous uncertainty. There was no immediate replacement crew because the political infrastructure required to organize one had disintegrated. Krikalev was not stranded in the romantic sense; he was held in place by the hard requirement of continuity. And that is the final inversion space delivers: when institutions fail and vanish on the ground, the person in orbit becomes the final memory of that institution, until Earth can reassemble itself enough to bring him home.

The shared lesson

Hadfield’s blindness, Williams’ extended mission, and Krikalev’s geopolitical time-slip are not three separate stories. They are three expressions of the same property. Put them side by side and the core insight snaps into focus: the purpose of preparedness is not to predict the future; it is to keep the future from collapsing when prediction fails.

That is why “Infinite Space” is misleading if interpreted only as empty distance. Space is infinite also because the contingency set is unbounded. Every component exists in an extreme environment. Every human body operates outside its evolutionary baseline. Every mission is embedded in a finite political economy that must still behave like a spacecraft, prioritizing margins, resisting schedule pressure, and tolerating uncertainty.

The point is not that space is hostile. It is that space is unforgiving of assumptions. It reveals which parts of our lives on Earth are stabilized by hidden infrastructure: gravity, state capacity, and the comforting fiction that tomorrow will resemble yesterday. Infinite space does not liberate humanity from rules. It forces us to confront the real ones.