Planetes revolves around the crew of an outer space garbage truck, basically. Fee, Yuri, Hachimaki and eventually Tanabe, pilot a ship that collects space debris. Left floating around Earth, the debris could prove dangerous to outer space travel, since even a tiny piece, with sufficient velocity, can tear through the hull of a ship.
There are occasional humorous chapters. Tanabe helping a guy on another crew who claims to be an alien exiled here - for making crop circles and turning cows inside out - understand how to interact with people. Hachimaki goes home and fights with his rocket-obsessed little brother. There's a flashback chapter about Hachimaki's dad playing baseball with the rest of the Mars mission crew while waiting for word on the birth of his first son back on Earth.
But a lot of chapters are ruminations on life and death, what matters to people and what should matter, the people left behind, that sort of thing. While Fee has her issues with her disobedient, compassionate son, and Yuri lost his wife when their shuttle got caught in a debris storm, most of it is focused on Hachimaki, and man, writer/artist Makoto Yukimura really lets Hachi have it from every direction.
When Hachi injures his ankle because he hasn't been doing enough exercise to offset the bone weakening from zero gravity and ponders returning to Earth, because space doesn't want humans here, Fee yells at him for being a crybaby and tells him to run home. When he sets his sights on being chosen for the "Jupiter mission" and dedicates himself to training like a madman, without concern for anything other than his desire to explore space, Tanabe yells at him for being heartless. He gets criticized by the head of a terrorist organization that bombs civilians in space stations for not caring about space and being willing to roll through anyone or anything to get out there. Again, this guy is a mass murderer, he's lecturing Hachi, and the story seems to present this as perfectly reasonable and not at all ridiculous.
And it's only Hachi who comes in for this. The guy in charge of the Jupiter mission is just as ruthless. When the engine testing lab explodes, killing 324 people, he offers blithe promises of financial compensation to the families, then says he's confident the data collected will help correct the flaw in the engine's design that caused the explosion. When confronted by the sister of one of the scientists, Lockwood remains unrepentant, telling the sister she didn't understand her brother at all. She has a gun, she doesn't shoot him. He just walks away, to keep doing what he's doing.
I'm left wondering why is it OK this guy continues on this path, but everyone keeps telling Hachimaki he's fucking up no matter what he does? Hachi's dad talks about 'selfish dreamers,' the ones who wanted to go to space like Tsiolkovsky and made their own personal dream into a goal for all mankind,. Lockwood seems to be exactly that kind of person, willing to cast anyone on the pyre of his dream and call it acceptable losses in some greater glory for the world, but his callousness apparently impresses Hachi's dad so much he goes back on his intent to retire in favor of joining the Jupiter mission. And Hachi's mom is OK with this, because she knows he'll always come back.
Sure, until he doesn't. This series reminds us often, space is extremely hostile to humans. No air, no water, solar flares that irradiate the hell out of you. Debris floating around that can blast your ship apart without a moment's warning. Yukimura draws a lot of pages showing part of the Earth, and space beyond as a void with only a few pinpricks of light. Or it's just space, nothing but emptiness and one poor astronaut in a suit. Unfortunately for me, all this works contrary to the statements we get from people about how they're always in space, because Earth is part of space. The Earth may be in space, but everything about this series says it is not of space, Carl Sagan's point we're all made of starstuff aside. So that doesn't work for me at all.
We meet astronauts who were in space so long they're eaten up with cancer from radiation. Hachi nearly dies when he gets disconnected from his ship, and is fortunate to be in the moon's shadow, or a solar flare would have killed him. As it is, the isolation, cut off even from communication, nearly destroys his career because he can't handle the sensory deprivation. During the training for the Jupiter mission, one of the other guys is injured in a crash (and would have died if Hachi didn't carry him for nearly 10 hours across the Moon until Fee and the others find them.) No more space for him, it's back to the Ukraine to herd cows!
But his mother's grateful he's alive - even if Hachi can't understand what she's saying - and that seems to be the main point. Even for these people who dedicate themselves to space and leave others behind on Earth, they still need those people who care about them. And they need to care about those people, I guess, although it's hard to see that. I see no sign Lockwood needs or cares about anyone, and I'm not sure how happy Hachi's pal was to be cut off forever from space, but it seems to be the lesson Hachi is supposed to learn. I don't really understand the approach Yukimura takes; Hachi hallucinates a version of himself in a spacesuit who encourages him to give up. Later it's some sort of strange spectral cat, then it's an alien that turns into Tanabe.
Because of course the two characters that fight and bicker and don't see eye-to-eye on anything are going to get married. Naturally. And it's handled in such an oddball way - Hachi asks while they're playing some word association game, and Tanabe can't explain later why she agreed - that it feels entirely perfunctory. Like Yukimura decided Hachi needed that character development and just forcefed it into the story.
Fortunately, during the stretch where the mission is on its way to Jupiter, Yukimura shifts to a plotline about the U.S. decrying some other country having weapons satellites and how that makes space unsafe. So they start destroying them. Even though this exponentially increases the amount of debris, to the point certain orbital paths become unusable. But if there's anything the last 25 years have demonstrated, it's that the United States is dumb as hell. This turns into Fee leading an operation to try and find a disable the weapon satellites and haul them away before there can be more destruction, trying to avoid the military the whole time. This seems to be a dive into Fee's character, her particular brand of stubborness, which manifests itself in other ways in her son that she struggles to navigate.
(There's a bit where a rogue officer in the U.S. military, who Yukimura draws to look like KFC mascot Colonel Sanders, uses AI to fake interviews where Fee, Yuri, and Tanabe explain why they're doing this. Disturbingly prescient.)
In total, there are parts of the series I like, and it looks gorgeous, but there are also a lot of character beats that feel inconsistent or simply land wrong with me.
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