In a story we found on medium.com, along with two Russian cosmonauts, Frank Culbertson was hundreds of miles above Earth on the still-under-construction International Space Station when he called Steve Hart at Mission Control Houston to report the results of a physical exam. Immediately, Hart told him, “Frank, we’re not having a very good day down here on Earth.”

At the time, the astronauts aboard the space station did not yet have live television or internet. Culbertson checked their location and realized that they were about to pass over New York where the attacks took place. He grabbed a camera and moved to a window where he was able to see dark smoke very clearly covering the sky in New York coming from Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.

As the station continued orbiting, Culbertson and the others onboard tried to keep up with what was happening down on Earth. “Every orbit we kept trying to see more of what was happening. One of the most startling effects was that within about two orbits, all of the contrails that are normally crisscrossing the United States has disappeared because they had grounded all the airplanes and there was nobody else flying in U.S. airspace — except for one airplane that was leaving a contrail from the central U.S. toward Washington, and that was Air Force One headed back to D.C. with President Bush. It was a very sobering time for us.” Read more on this story here.