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FROM experiencing the sublime beauty of the blue planet through the porthole of a spacecraft to worrying about what happens if someone dies onboard, everyone wants to know what it is like to be an astronaut. It is, after all, quite literally like nothing on Earth.

New books by two fighter pilots who set out to discover how much of 鈥渢he right stuff鈥� they possessed don鈥檛 disappoint. Fittingly, since Samantha Cristoforetti and Terry Virts spent 200 days together in 2014 aboard the International Space Station (ISS), their books are published just weeks apart.

Cristoforetti and Virts both chronicle their journeys from childhood dreams to the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA respectively, but they capture their time off-world in different ways.

The diary-like approach taken by Cristoforetti is more obviously personal, with entries pegged to highlights such as the momentous phone call from ESA telling her she had been selected for astronaut training 鈥� which she missed after taking too long in the shower.

That was 18 May 2009, when she was a fighter pilot at Istrana Air Base in Italy, but her book begins six years later with an entry titled TMA-15M, 11 June 2015. At the end of her time in orbit 400 kilometres above Earth, she writes: 鈥淚f everything goes to plan, we鈥檒l be reborn as Earthlings.鈥� She still holds the record for the longest uninterrupted spaceflight by a European astronaut.

There is even more poetry in Cristoforetti鈥檚 account, as she describes the Mediterranean as looking as though Venus were about to emerge from the waters.

鈥淏urial 鈥榓t sea鈥� means the crew must take the dead astronaut鈥檚 body out of the airlock and push it into space鈥�

Virts takes a different tack. He first reached the ISS in 2010 and became an ISS commander in 2015. Each of his chapters covers a facet of astronaut life: in one, we learn that as a private cabin is the size of a phone booth, most astronauts clip their sleeping bags to the wall. Virts may seem less poetic than Cristoforetti, but he is the one who sometimes prefers to sleep floating, because it 鈥渇eels like you are in a void, with nothing else in the universe other than your being; everything鈥� fades to black鈥�.

There is little about the onboard relationship between the writers in either book, but if you want a feel for them, there is an amusing in which Virts gives Cristoforetti a haircut.

The ISS is a serious place, however. Cristoforetti recounts the experiments in which she helped investigate the effects of space travel on the immune system and the microbiome. She also worked on a project to add nanoparticles to bone to combat osteoporosis 鈥� a vital issue in space as astronauts lose up to 10 per cent of their bone mass in months.

There are other big problems, too. Virts details what can happen if a crew member dies. Training allows for burial 鈥渁t sea鈥� or returning the body to Earth. If the person鈥檚 family prefers the former, the crew has to take the body out of the airlock for a final spacewalk and push it into the void. It lacks the dignity of Spock鈥檚 funeral in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, but it is what could really happen.

So were there any dangers on the ISS? Virts recalls a seriously chilling moment when mission control told them there could be an ammonia leak on the station. In the end, it was a false alarm. Yet fear and thrilling spacewalks are the 鈥渋cing on the cake鈥�, he says, adding that 鈥渦sually with astronauts, our lives are all about the cake鈥�.

Each extraordinary second is earned by months of the kind of mundane detail that wouldn鈥檛 even make the cutting room floor of that ultra-realist movie, The Martian. But perhaps that is the point: there is true wonder and poetry in such detail.