Astronaut Jessica Meir’s return to Earth has been far from ordinary

When astronauts return to Earth, they are generally given the opportunity to sit back and adjust to being back in Earth’s gravity. Plunging through the atmosphere can be a difficult journey, so after taking crew members out of their capsule, they are taken to a staging area where they can relax while medical officers perform routine check-ups.

Jessica Meir’s return was not like that.

Moments after Meir landed on April 17 after more than 200 days in space, she was flown aboard a helicopter for a three-hour flight to the city of Baikonur in southern Kazakhstan, near where her capsule had landed. From there, Meir and fellow NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan spent another three hours driven to a nearby city for their flight back to Houston.

“We call it the airplane, train and car version of trying to go home,” Meir said.

The drastic measures were implemented due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which Meir, Morgan and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka observed from the International Space Station until their return home this month. Border closings and other travel restrictions due to the pandemic also forced NASA and the Russian space agency to alter the standard recovery process.

Meir returned to a different world than the one she left about seven months ago.

“I wasn’t really ready to go,” said Meir. “I would have loved to stay there longer and especially come home to a completely different planet, like the one we have returned to. It’s an interesting transition. “

Once back in the United States, Meir and Morgan entered a week-long quarantine at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. A short separation period is standard, but because astronauts on long-duration space flights generally experience changes to their immune systems, NASA imposed a lengthy quarantine to protect the two astronauts from any Earth-bound pathogens.

“Something about the environment of space flight has a direct influence on our immune system, and so they wanted to be more conservative with what we were exposed to when we first returned,” Meir said, adding that returning astronauts are physiologically similar to people with compromised immune systems

Still, she said being back home has made the pandemic more real to her. Although he had access to the news aboard the space station and was in regular contact with his loved ones, the crew’s daily operations for the most part continued without interruption.

“It was really this stark contrast because of course Earth didn’t look any different to us,” he said. “It looked so beautiful, just as impressive as before everything happened. And then think about what was happening on the surface and that each person, the seven and a half billion people on the planet were being affected by this and only three of us who were in space at the time were not. That was also really difficult to understand, that we were the only three individuals that were not affecting our lives in any way. “

But Meir said looking at the planet from the station’s orbital perch offered a unique perspective on the unfolding situation, citing examples of astronauts who were in space during other major events in history, including the 9/11 terrorist attacks. September 2001.

“There was actually a cosmonaut on a space station during the collapse of the Soviet Union, so he launched himself as a Soviet citizen and then came back and carried a flag that really no longer existed,” said Meir. “But I think this was even more extreme just because it was literally affecting all humans, all countries.”

Meir emerged from NASA quarantine last week, but is now in another form of social isolation, one that people in states across the country and around the world have been facing for weeks, and in some cases, months.

As he described himself as “hugging,” Meir hoped to reconnect with family and friends, but those plans are temporarily on hold. And although his training has taught him to deal with isolation, living and working 250 miles above the planet in a laboratory in orbit about the length of a soccer field, the experience of social distancing is very different on the ground. .

“It is so different here because you are not used to being isolated on Earth,” he said. “That is not the way our society is built. So for me this is much more difficult to handle, particularly after being away for so long. ”

However, despite the curve of returning to Earth during a global health crisis, Meir described her mission as a dream come true. During her 205 days in space, Meir made history in October by participating in NASA’s first women’s spacewalk with astronaut Christina Koch.

At the time, Meir focused primarily on executing all of the complicated steps of the spacewalk, but said the subsequent flow of public support helped her and Koch understand the importance of the milestone.

“It would have been an incredible spacewalk no matter who I went out with,” he said. “But we really didn’t miss how important it was as an event, how noteworthy it was as an event for people, actually much more than I would have expected. I was really overwhelmed to see that response and that was very humbling and It really meant a lot to us. “