Synopsis
By 2075, traveling through space has become an ordinary part of daily life rather than a distant fantasy. Scientific and technological progress has enabled lunar colonization, the commercialization of outer space, and the rise of massive space corporations. Ai Tanabe, a cheerful young woman fascinated by the cosmos, joins Technora Corporation and is assigned to the Debris Section—a team tasked with clearing hazardous space junk from the orbital paths between Earth and the Moon. Ai quickly realizes how little respect her role commands. The Debris Section is the butt of jokes at Technora: chronically understaffed, barely funded, and forced to operate a worn-out spaceship nicknamed the "Toy Box" for its debris retrieval missions. Unfazed, Ai presses on and grows familiar with the quirky crew members, including the clumsy yet kind-hearted chief clerk Philippe Myers; the mysterious, tight-lipped temporary worker Edelgard Rivera; and the hot-tempered, passionate Hachirouta Hoshino, who dreams of owning his own spaceship. Planetes is an unconventional sci-fi story that uses the immense scale of space as a backdrop for the everyday lives of ordinary people—individuals born on Earth, but whose aspirations and dreams reach for the stars.
Background
Planetes is the winner of the 2005 Seiun Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in science fiction.
