Close Approach

Close Approach is a near-future techno-thriller novella about one long night in a satellite operations room. Two dead satellites have collided, and the debris is sweeping through the constellation of a small Finnish Earth-observation company. Flight dynamics engineer Dara Kallio has a few hours to plan and fly the avoidance manoeuvres that keep her fleet alive, with the company's executives watching over her shoulder.

Close Approach is a near-future techno-thriller and hard science fiction novella. It's a procedural story: the tension comes from orbital mechanics, deadlines and decisions made with incomplete data, not from villains or chases. There's no conspiracy and no investigation; the antagonist is physics, and the debris nobody owns.

Yes. Everything in Close Approach is grounded in how satellite operators really work today: collision warnings, avoidance burns, fuel budgets, tracking radars and ground-station passes. There's no faster-than-light travel, no aliens and no invented physics. I'm an aerospace engineer, and I wrote it to hold up for readers who work in the industry.

No. Close Approach has no aliens, no weapons and no space combat, and nobody leaves the ground. The whole story happens in one operations centre near Helsinki, and the danger is debris from a real kind of accident.

Dara Kallio, a flight dynamics engineer at Valo Space, a Finnish satellite start-up. Close Approach follows her alone, in close third person, from the moment her phone rings before dawn to the end of the crisis. She's good at her job, knows every satellite in the fleet by its quirks, and has to make calls the automated systems can't.

No romance plot. Dara has a partner, Kaisa, waiting at home, and their moments are brief and warm: a goodbye at the door, a packed breakfast, a few text messages. There's nothing sexual in Close Approach.

In the operations centre of Valo Space in Keilaniemi, Espoo, just outside Helsinki, over one night and morning in January. Close Approach runs for about ten hours, from a phone call at 03:40 until the crisis is over.

Readers who liked the problem-solving in Andy Weir's The Martian, or the mission-control tension of Apollo 13, and anyone who enjoys watching a competent professional work a hard problem against the clock. Close Approach suits readers who like procedural detail and a single, focused point of view, and who want a complete story they can finish in one evening.

Readers expecting the spectacle of a film like Gravity. Close Approach is about the same kind of danger, but seen from the ground, where it's managed with numbers, screens and phone calls. There's no action hero and no one in peril in orbit, and the pleasure is in the decisions, not in explosions.

Close Approach shares the problem-solving register of Andy Weir's The Martian and the procedural rigour of Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain: experts working a crisis step by step, with the technical detail carrying the tension. Readers of Neal Stephenson's Seveneves will recognise the danger, a cascade of orbital debris, told here at the scale of one company on one night, and readers of Daniel Suarez's Delta-v the near-future commercial space industry. On screen, the closest cousin is Apollo 13: a control room, a clock and no room for error.

Yes. Close Approach has no violence, no sexual content, and one mild swear word in the whole book, and nobody is hurt. It's written for adults, and the technical and business detail is dense, but there's nothing in it a younger reader shouldn't read. Teenagers interested in space or engineering are a good fit.

Very few. Close Approach is a tense workplace crisis: stress, pressure from the company's executives, and the loss of machines the main character cares about. The full list is under Content notes, below.

Yes. Close Approach is free for readers who join my newsletter. You'll get one email with the download links, then about one email a month, only when there's something real to say. You can unsubscribe at any time and keep the book.

Enter your email on the Close Approach page and confirm it from the email that arrives. A minute later a second email brings the download links. The novella is delivered through StoryOrigin, which can send it straight to your Kindle or download it to your phone, tablet or e-reader.

EPUB, for Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books and most e-readers and apps, and PDF. Close Approach is delivered through StoryOrigin, which can also send it straight to your Kindle.

Yes. Close Approach ends with a bonus: "The Orbit Nobody Owned", the New York Ledger feature by journalist Alex Carter that the novella quotes, printed in full. Alex Carter is the investigative reporter at the centre of Moon Shadows.

No. Close Approach is only available free through the newsletter, not in any store. Moon Shadows, the novel, is on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited.

About 18,000 words in seven chapters, plus the short bonus article at the end: a novella you can read in one long evening.

An Italian translation of Close Approach is in preparation. Italian readers can sign up now on the Italian page and will receive it when it's ready.

Yes. Close Approach is a complete story with its own cast and a resolved ending, no cliffhanger. You don't need to have read anything else first.

No. Close Approach and Moon Shadows have different characters and different stories, and either can be read first. Readers of Moon Shadows will recognise one detail: the novella quotes an article by Alex Carter, the journalist at the centre of the novel.

Either. Close Approach is a short, free way to see how I write before committing to a full novel. Moon Shadows is the bigger story, if you already know you like this kind of book.

Very. The collision warnings Dara receives, the probability thresholds she works to, the fuel budget she spends, the tracking radars and ground stations she relies on, and the chain-reaction risk known as the Kessler syndrome are all real. The debris in Close Approach comes from a real collision: the 2009 crash between the Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 satellites. The company and its satellites are invented; everything they have to deal with is not.

I wanted to spend time in Alex Carter's world before the events of Moon Shadows, and to see it through someone who has never met him. Close Approach was also a chance to write about a part of the space industry that rarely reaches fiction: satellite operations.

Low Earth orbit is filling up fast. Large constellations now put thousands of satellites in the same shells, and every operator lives with the risk of collision. That risk is managed quietly, night after night, by engineers who read the warnings and plan the manoeuvres that keep their satellites out of the way. I wanted to put the reader in that room.

I'm an Italian aerospace engineer, and I live in Rome. I write near-future thrillers about people solving hard problems, anchored in real science and researched engineering. Close Approach is my first novella; my first novel, Moon Shadows, launched worldwide in August 2026.