Here at 1:08:00 and here at 4:45 Massimino describes seeing Earth from a spacewalk. Not knowing his beliefs, I don’t want to put words in his mouth. So I’ll do what he did and tell you how I felt about it. His experience made me think that he saw a glimpse of us from outside the claws of the Curse. Things get ugly down here, and this was such a beautiful and much-needed reminder of what was, and of what was meant to be.
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| Hubble Telescope, PC: Pixabay |
"When you first get to space and you look out the window of the shuttle, it’s magnificent what you see, but it’s kind of like looking at an aquarium.
When you go out on spacewalk and see the planet I found that to be a different experience. It was just extraordinary to step out of the space shuttle … to go out there in the expanse of space. …You’re stepping out into the abyss. Now there’s no walls around you.
Everything opens up. You’re not looking through the framed window. You can look anywhere. You have the bubble of your helmet. You’re always tethered, but nonetheless you’re out there.
My first space walk I didn’t look around too much. I didn’t want to get distracted. My second spacewalk, I really had a chance to soak it in.
At the Hubble altitude (about a hundred miles higher than the space station) you can see the planet in its entirety. You can see the curvature, and it looks like a big ball.
It was really really bright. It was more than bright, it was pure light. Everything was illuminated in its purest form.
This is the way you’re supposed to see things. I wish I could have taken the eye exam under these conditions. Everything just seemed clear and true. Everything - the colors on the flag on my arm, the labeling around the space shuttle. Everything was just clear.
When you get into the darkness, all that light goes away. It’s the absence of light. It’s the darkest dark. All light is now gone. The sun is no longer there. It’s the darkest dark, and you use your helmet lights and the lights on the shuttle to get around and to do your work.
There’s no words to explain how beautiful our planet is, and I’m not smart enough to invent them, so I try to explain how I felt about it. When I really looked without thinking and let my emotions take over what was happening…
When I first looked, I almost couldn’t stand to look at it. I turned my head. The thought that went through my head was, This is something I’m not supposed to look at. It’s a secret. People aren’t supposed to see this.
I looked again, and the second time I looked I started to get a little emotional. I gotta catch myself because I was afraid I might start to tear up, and if I get some water in my spacesuit it could cause a problem, and then there’d be an investigation and I’d have to admit that I was crying. So I quickly got myself under control, but I looked a third time.
That third time that I looked, the thought that went through my head was, If you’re in Heaven, this is what you would see. This is the view from Heaven. And then it was immediately replaced by another thought. No, it’s more beautiful than that. This is what Heaven must look like. I felt in that moment that I was looking into Heaven. I was looking into a paradise.
I don’t see how anything can be more beautiful than our planet. I don’t know what Heaven is like, but I can’t imagine that it’s any more beautiful than the place we live in now. That’s what it seemed like to me.
The ultimate paradise, the ultimate beauty is our planet.
It’s perfection.”
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| Planet Earth, PC: Pixabay |
Also, from Massimino's book Spaceman:
“And my thought looking down at the Earth was Wow. How much God our Father must love us that he gave us this home. He didn’t put us on Mars or Venus with nothing but rocks and frozen waste. He gave us paradise and said, “Live here.” It’s not easy to wrap your head around the origins and purpose of the universe, but that’s the best way I can describe the feelings I had.”
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