Planetes

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GOOD BITS: The art is magnificent, it is crazy impressive how Makoto Yukimura drew such detailed spacecraft before moving onto vikings. It's clear he understand what he's drawing as well, the pages detailing the propulsion system in spacesuits and the helmets etc. are quite detailed despite not being necessary for the plot.
The characters and the growth they go through are fascinating, each character is wholely different from one another and they each change in meaningful ways.
The story, while simple, is also interesting and involves a couple twists and turns which help make it interesting. The main story is simple but it provides room ... for growth and has a clear end in sight.

BAD BITS: There aren't many. My biggest complaint is that Yuri can be a bit underutilised, but he had his story in the first chapter and before the main plot begins, he doesn't have much more room to grow so the story doesn't have to focus on him.
That's really it apart from some nitpicky or personal things like the old Ukrainian woman not being translated, but it just becomes a positive when you can still understand the sentiment behind her words from the art alone.

TLDR: Amazing characters and world with amazing art.

Short Spoilerless Review

Planetes is a Manga that was in my plan to read for a long long time.
It has the same author as Vinland Saga ,one of my favourite manga,but it failed to make me feel the same as his other work did.

The story had some interesting parts and in my opinion peaked around the second half of the manga ,but there were still many points that I was straight up bored. The characters were nice with enough depth and the art was pretty good too.
Nonetheless ,I didn't enjoy Planetes as much as other people did, cause it made me feel tired more than enough ... times

Overall, it was a fine manga ,I do not think that I would recommend it,but I would encourage you to try reading some of the first chapters and decide for yourselves

Planetes is hailed as a hard sci-fi classic, with an amazing and well-realized world. The popular perception is that it is a thinking person's manga, that it is lifelike and [insert hyperbole here]. I am impressed by how well the world of Planetes is constructed by someone without a background in it. Unfortunately, the contextualizing socioeconomics, politics, discussions of orbital regimes, etc. are all just window dressing. This manga is not about those things. This manga is about the main cast. They aren't very interesting or extremely compelling to follow. I would not refer to them as static, but I would also not call them ... particularly inspiring models of growth. I'm not reading this manga for them, and they don't help draw me in with their core personality traits, but I certainly have to see the world as they do - and they are kind of clueless? This is where things start kind of falling apart.

Planetes really takes the plowshares approach to visualizing the future: a bunch of low-tech grunts doing jobs. A combination of them as the vantage point and how the author doesn't have a strong conception of the world beyond what's on the surface and perhaps a layer deeper cause it to kind of spiral if you are really intrigued by the topics and start learning about it. This may be a big nitpick since I come at this with about a decade of work as an aerospace engineer on the subject matter of the manga, space debris/trash, but I don't like to grade on a curve. Planetes unfortunately isn't visually impressive enough (although it is pretty and appropriately presents JAXA utilitarian styles when it doesn't get too far into sci-fi for its own good) and doesn't provide enough depth to the real draw for many to garner a strong recommendation from me. It's novel, but if you want hard sci-fi which provides you real value and insights then 2070s space janitors is not the way to go.