JV Venable

On the morning of September 11, 2001, NASA astronaut Frank Culbertson was floating two hundred and fifty miles above the planet as commander of Expedition 3 aboard the International Space Station. As the only American off the planet that day, his routine was shattered during a medical check-in when flight surgeon Steve Hart informed him from Mission Control Houston that terrible events were unfolding back home. Checking the station’s orbital tracking map, Culbertson realized their trajectory was about to carry them directly over New England and the mid-Atlantic coast within minutes. Rushing to a window in the Russian segment with a video camera in hand, Culbertson peered down through the pristine void of space at the eastern seaboard. What he saw was a dark, massive plume of smoke billowing out from Lower Manhattan, fanning across the Atlantic Ocean. As he zoomed in, the haze enveloped the tip of the island, a silent, surreal sight marking the catastrophic collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Joined by his Russian crewmates, Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Turin, Culbertson watched in solemn shock, capturing footage of his wounded homeland while traveling at seventeen thousand five hundred miles per hour. The heartbreak deepened the following day when ground control delivered a devastating personal blow: Charles "Chic" Burlingame, Culbertson’s close friend and classmate from the U.S. Naval Academy, had been the captain of American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. Cut off from the rest of humanity, the weight of isolation pressed heavily on the commander. To honor his fallen friend and the thousands who perished, Culbertson retrieved his trumpet, a instrument he had brought along for his months in orbit, and played "Taps" into the quiet solitude of the station, sending a final musical salute floating high above the Earth. His Russian crewmates, Vladimir Dezhurov and Mikhail Tyurin, went to extraordinary lengths to support him through his isolation and grief. Beyond standing vigil with him at the windows, they continuously relayed every update they received from the Russian Mission Control Center, gave him absolute privacy when he needed to process the shock, and Tyurin even prepared a comforting hot bowl of borscht for Culbertson's dinner on the night of September 11 to help anchor him during an unimaginably surreal and lonely night. #archaeohistories