FILE – This photo provided by Roscosmos shows the International Space Station from a Russian Soyuz MS-19 spaceship after undocking on March 30, 2022. (Roscosmos State Space Corporation via AP, File) Before Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, David Bowie famously sang a melancholy song about “Major Tom,” an astronaut who never made it home, floating into the galaxies, far from family.
Today my family is singing a joyful song — no “Major Tom,” here.
The NASA astronaut in our family is back on Earth.
Welcome home, Chris Williams.
Chris landed Sunday morning in Kazakhstan after traveling an extraordinary 102 million miles during eight months on the International Space Station. A recovery team then escorted my nephew to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
It is amazing that ever-curious Chris, the son of Roger and Ginger, a child who wore a onesie with astronauts on it, now wears the U.S. flag on a real spacesuit.
Twice he floated in space. He was tethered to the space station while on space walks to repair robotic space arms on the space station. My mind was blown as I watched him live on the NASA channel.
Inside the space station he and fellow astronauts measured how eyes change in zero gravity. They checked on how the human brain orients its sense of direction in space. They also tracked bone density and DNA changes to gauge the impact a long space journey has on the human body.
In January, after a fellow American had to be evacuated due to illness, Chris began a month as the only American on the space station.
Then came another emergency. An air leak on the space station in early June prompted NASA to order Chris and four other astronauts out of the space station. They sheltered on a separate, smaller “Dragon” spacecraft. On Earth, his wife and children kept watch for two hours until the problem was fixed.
In May, I was surprised to see USA Today describe Chris as “famous for his astral photography.”
From the space station’s glass cupola, he captured thrilling photos in February of fireworks erupting below the Space Station as China celebrated Lunar New Year.
“Duuuuude! You are officially [the greatest] for orbital fireworks imagery,” wrote astronaut Zena Cardman. “It is not easy to capture an image with such clarity and balance of color…” wrote NASA astronaut Anne McClain.
In April, he put pictures on social media of a fiery object streaking miles above West Africa. It might have been wreckage from a satellite sailing through space. Whatever it was, it created a stellar picture.
In Chris’ words: “It was quite a light show!”
Chris also took time during his space travel to talk with young people, kindergarteners to high school seniors, from New York and Florida.
One student asked him to explain the difference between a scientist doing research on Earth and on the space station. Chris was a physics major at Stanford. He has a Ph.D. from MIT and a graduate degree in the use of medical radiation from Harvard Medical school.
In space, Chris said, every instrument and jar floats away. He pointed to Velcro strips on his clothes and on the walls. He uses them to keep things handy.
The young people wanted to know if dried food was good. He said it was pretty good, thanks to food science experts in Houston.
And it was fun when he released a bubble of water inside the space station. It floated around his head. Then he played Pac-Man and gobbled it up.
Everyone got a kick out of that.
The question-and-answer sessions with Chris were held to inspire young Americans to study science and math. He encouraged them to lead the U.S. back to the moon and even beyond, to Mars.
And in April when four other American astronauts flew around the moon on the Artemis II, the first Americans near the moon in 50 years, Chris watched from the space station and directly talked with his friends.
He taped a memorable segment for “Fox News Sunday” with Shannon Bream. As the newsmaker interview ended, he floated up and off the screen. That was a first for a TV guest and left a studio full of camera and audio professionals with their mouths open.
On a personal level, he regularly called home, speaking to his wife and daughters as well as his sister, Ashley, and parents. He got me on the phone one day as I was shopping at Macy’s.
One Sunday afternoon he joined a streaming session with far-flung members of our family, everyone from toddlers to seniors, across the U.S., in Europe and Panama.
On Father’s Day, his live image streamed into Trinity Episcopal Church to wish his dad a happy Father’s Day.
The people in church say they will never forget talking in real time with a real American astronaut as he traveled around the Earth at 17,000 miles per hour, on the way to completing more than 3,856 orbits around the Earth.
In church, I cried when Roger, his dad, read a prayer. It praised a son who has grown “beyond every expectation,” and asked that God “strengthen you, and bring you safely home.”
Then the congregation offered final words asking the spirit on high to keep Chris “in safety and peace [and] reunite us in joy.”
Rev. Shayna Watson led the congregation in a unified refrain to end the prayer: “Until We See You Again.”
That day is today.
Juan Williams is senior political analyst for Fox News Channel and a prize-winning civil rights historian. He is the author of the new book “New Prize for These Eyes: The Rise of America’s Second Civil Rights Movement.“
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