Where is it? New York City, NY [ on Sept. 13. “The dichotomy of being on a spacecraft dedicated to improving life on the earth and watching life being destroyed by such willful, terrible acts is jolting to the psyche.”
While in space, Culbertson learned that the pilot of the plane that was later hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon was his former flight school classmate Charles “Chic” Burlingame. When the ISS later passed over the Pentagon, the astronauts could see the large gash in the side of the building where the third plane had crashed. “Tears don’t flow the same in space,” Culbertson wrote while discussing his friend.
In 2017, Culbertson revealed that there was another striking thing he and the rest of his crew noticed in the wake of the attacks, according to Live Science’s sister site Space.com. “One of the most startling effects was that within about two orbits, all of the contrails that are normally crisscrossing the United States had disappeared because they had grounded all the airplanes,” he said.
However, there was one exception. The astronauts noticed a single contrail moving eastward across the Midwest. “That was Air Force One headed back to D.C. with President Bush,” Culbertson said. It was a “very sobering” sight, he added.
See more Earth from space
Final Space Shuttle ‘photobomb’
This 2011 astronaut photo captured one of NASA’s iconic space shuttles passing between Earth and the International Space Station for the very last time.
Russian ‘river of smoke’ eruption
A false-color satellite photo from 2023 shows a devilish pair of lava flows and an enormous plume of smoke spewing from Klyuchevskoy, the tallest volcano in Europe and Asia.
Trippy ‘Biomass’ satellite snap
The first false-color image from ESA’s newly operational Biomass satellite shows off a unique perspective of the rainforests, grasslands and wetlands surrounding a winding river in Bolivia.
