Billionaire Chen Yuanshan spends 450 million to buy a ticket to space, all to answer the question his father asked on his deathbed: After earning so much money, was this life worth it?
At an altitude of 117 kilometers, he experiences four minutes of weightlessness. Through the porthole, Earth is just a blue marble suspended in endless darkness. The layer of atmosphere protecting eight billion people is as thin as an apple's skin.
At that moment, he is no longer hungry.
After returning from space, he sets aside his business empire and builds a dark-sky preserve on the western plateau. In a classroom on the Loess Plateau, he teaches a girl named Li Xiaohua to draw stars. She says that when she grows up, she wants to go to space and see whether Earth really is that blue.
He doesn't know how long that blue halo can last, or whether he'll live to see Halley's Comet return. But he knows that some things are worth more than money.
