CoVid-19 News: Astronauts Come Home to Surreal New World

To the brave men and women orbiting Earth on the International Space Station, coming home will be a “surreal” experience.

Quarantining is nothing new to astronauts — as featured in Apollo 13, it’s never a good idea to be sick in space — but it’s new to return to Earth and enter quarantine. As our current roster of astronauts on the ISS rotate out and Soyuz home, they’re returning to a planet vastly different than the one they left.

With CoVid-19 cases at 3,081,410 world-wide, and a death rate of 212,337 (as of today on the WorldOMeter), the space explorers are returning to a dystopian nightmare, straight out of a science fiction movie.

ILFScience! reports that Cosmonaut Oleg Skrypochka, and US astronauts Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan made a successful parachute landing on April 17, 2020, after spending between seven and nine months in space.

“It’s quite surreal to see it unfolding on Earth below,” Meir said at a news conference on April 10. “We can tell you the Earth looks just as stunning from up here, so it’s difficult to believe all the changes that have taken place.”

The astro/cosmonauts had been in touch with friends, family and society during their tenure, and were aware of the awful pandemic sweeping the globe. However, it’s notable that the planet itself looked the same to them. Meir said, “We can tell you the Earth looks just as stunning from up here, so it’s difficult to believe all the changes that have taken place.”

The Earth spins on, with or without humanity, indifferent to our woes. And as the global lockdown revealed, the environment started to heal in our absence. What lessons we take from this horrific experiment remains to be seen.

A good time to watch space and astronaut based movies

At RunPee, we salute Earth’s most intrepid explorers! We respectfully suggest honoring them in our own quarantines by rewatching some quality (and one slightly less honorable) astronaut films. You can probably guess most of the space movies on our list. Let me know what we left off.