About Planetes
Planetes is a hard-science-fiction anime produced by the studio Sunrise and directed by Goro Taniguchi, adapted from Makoto Yukimura's manga. Set in the year 2075, it imagines a near future in which humanity has expanded routine operations into low Earth orbit and beyond. Decades of spaceflight have left orbit cluttered with abandoned satellites, spent rocket stages, and stray debris traveling at speeds that make even a lost bolt a lethal hazard to crewed vessels.
The story follows the Debris Section of the Technora Corporation, an underfunded and overlooked department whose job is to collect and dispose of this dangerous orbital junk. Among its crew are Hachirota Hoshino, nicknamed Hachimaki, a young spaceman who dreams of one day owning his own ship; Ai Tanabe, an idealistic new recruit who believes love can guide human action even in the vacuum of space; and Fee Carmichael, the section's seasoned and unflappable EVA pilot. Their daily work is unglamorous, but the series treats it with rare seriousness and care.
Praised for its grounded, humane vision of life in space, Planetes balances meticulous technical detail with intimate character drama. Rather than dwelling on spectacle, it asks what it actually means to live and work beyond Earth, and how ambition, family, economics, and politics shape that frontier. The result is a thoughtful, character-driven work widely regarded as one of the more realistic depictions of near-future spaceflight in anime.