NASA astronauts are returning from space to a changed world due to coronavirus

Antonia Jaramillo
Florida Today
The three-member Expedition 62 crew poses for a portrait inside the Harmony module. Harmony is connected to three International Space Station laboratory modules -- Europe's Columbus, Japan's Kibo and the United States' Destiny lab modules. Clockwise from bottom are, NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka.

When NASA astronauts Andrew Morgan and Jessica Meir, and their fellow crewmate, cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka of the Russian space agency, return home next Friday, it will be to a very different Earth than the one they had left.

More than six months ago, Meir and Skripochka departed the pale blue dot we call home — Morgan had already been living on the space station since July — without any signs of a pandemic hitting the world.  

But a few months after their September liftoff, the first cases of the coronavirus started creeping up in Wuhan, China, and quickly spread throughout the world. Meir, Morgan and Skripochka watched from the safe confines of the space station, some 254 miles above Earth, as Earth essentially ground to a halt: cities forced into quarantine, businesses shuttered, schools closed.

The Expedition 62 crew poses for a portrait aboard the International Space Station's U.S. Destiny laboratory module. Roscosmos Commander Oleg Skripochka, in the middle, is flanked by NASA Flight Engineers Andrew Morgan and Jessica Meir, Thursday, Feb. 20, 2020,

"For me, it'll still be nice to go back and to see some familiar places and some familiar faces," Meir told reporters during a Friday teleconference from space. "It certainly will be very difficult for me to not be able to give some hugs to my family and friends. That's something after being up here for seven months, and being the type of person that I am is going to be difficult for me not to do that but I know that'll be part of the game for a while."

She continued:  "I think that I will actually feel more isolated on the Earth than I did up here, just because that's part of our expected routine up here ... When you're back in your homes and the kind of isolation that everybody is dealing with right now and you can see all of those things or all those people but you just can't do anything with them or experience them at all, I think that makes it even more difficult."

Meir was born and raised in Caribou, Maine while Morgan considers New Castle, Pennsylvania to be his hometown.

NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, who joined Meir, Morgan and Skripochka onboard the space station April 9, along with Roscosmos cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner, got an early taste of the isolation that comes from being in space.

Shortly after leaving Houston toward the end of February to prepare for his upcoming spaceflight, Cassidy and the rest of his crew were placed into more extreme quarantine than what was previously done for astronauts. 

"So from the first week of March, until launch, I did not come in contact with anyone other than those immediate people involved with the launch preparation, and those people were also in the same quarantine," Cassidy said.

"Normally when you get to Baikonur, there are press conferences ... and none of those people were allowed into the building ... So there was virtually no interaction between us as a crew and the outside population," Cassidy said. "We know lots of cases where people have thought they're good to go, but it's snuck into their world, but I really think there's almost 0% chance for our group."

Confidence is so high that as they talked from space to journalists on Earth, Meir, Morgan and Cassidy didn't practice any social distancing, which would be hard anyway onboard the space station.

Meir, Morgan and Skripochka are scheduled to land in Kazakhstan at 1:18 a.m. ET April 17 — 50 years to the date the Apollo 13 crew successfully splashed down.

Cassidy, Ivanishin and Vagner will stay onboard the space station for approximately six months, and will greet NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley who are scheduled to arrive at the space station next month on SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule, a historic return to flight for the United States which has been without the capability since the space shuttle retired in 2011. 

"There are many, many terrible sides to what's happening right now and I think we all recognize that. But what we can do is to try to find those silver linings and the positive elements," Meir said. "One of those that some of my family and friends have been talking about back home is the connections that they've been able to foster with their loved ones ... so I think that it's creating a little bit more of that innate human element out and reminding people of their priorities and reminding them of what is truly important." 

Contact Jaramillo at 321-242-3668 or antoniaj@floridatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter at @AntoniaJ_11.

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