On 4 Oct. 2018, NASA astronaut Ricky Arnold returned to Earth following his 197-day stint aboard the International Space Station (ISS). After watching Ricky’s Soyuz launch on March 21, 2018, the Soyuz docking with the ISS, various space walks, and various interviews that Ricky made with various groups on earth, it was exciting to finally watch the live-stream of Soyuz capsule landing on the Kazakhstan steppe. Ricky was accompanied by the Russian cosmonaut, Oleg Artemyev, and his fellow NASA astronaut, Drew Feustral.

Early in his International Space Station (ISS) stay, Ricky provided a wonderful video welcome to the inaugural Maryland State of the Coast conference. As a response to Ricky’s welcome video, during the opening plenary, I played a music video that our Integration and Application Network (IAN) team had produced. The video was entitled “Miss Chesapeake Bay” and was a take off of “American Pie” by Don McLean and sung by Melanie Jackson, a Marine Environmental Estuarine Science (MEES) graduate student. I encouraged the entire audience of 250+ attendees to sing along so that we could make a video to send back to Ricky.

NASA was able to send the video up to Ricky in the ISS and several weeks later I received a surprise phone call from Ricky. He was able to patch through via the internet to phone me for the period of time that the ISS was able to connect with the internet satellite. Ricky thanked me for the video, and we talked about some of his video links with various groups, including one he had made with Sea Semester students, a program that we had both been involved with. Ricky said his Sea Semester experience aboard a tall ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean was the best training he had experienced for becoming an astronaut. He also recalled the NASA panel spending a lot of time asking about his seagoing experience while interviewing him for the astronaut position, so it clearly factored into his eventually becoming a NASA astronaut.

One of the things that struck me while talking with Ricky was that he had become somewhat wistful when he mentioned that he, Drew, and Oleg had just crossed the halfway threshold of their ISS mission. I could tell that he was going to be ready to come home in October. I started thinking about his journey home, and the Simon and Garfunkel classic song “Homeward Bound” came to mind. I adapted their song to “Earthward Bound” with the following lyrics:

Earthward Bound
William C. Dennison
1 Oct 2018

I’m floating in the ISS1
Got a Soyuz2 to my destination
On a tour of earth orbits
My space suit and laptop in hand
And every day is neatly planned
For astronauts and cosmonauts3.

Earthward bound
I wish I was
Earthward bound
Earth, where my thought’s escaping
Earth, where my music’s playing
Earth, where my love lies waiting
Silently for me

Everyday is an endless stream
Of to-do lists and exercise4
And each town looks the same to me,
The distant lights blinking up at me
And every star that I see
Reminds me that I long to be

Earthward bound
I wish I was
Earthward bound
Earth, where my thought’s escaping
Earth, where my music’s playing
Earth, where my love lies waiting
Silently for me

Tonight I’ll sleep without a pillow5
I’ll play the game and pretend
But all my orbits do not change
The fact that I am far away from earth
Like emptiness of outer space
I need someone to comfort me

Earthward bound
I wish I was
Earthward bound
Earth, where my thought’s escaping
Earth, where my music’s playing
Earth, where my love lies waiting
Silently for me

The Earthward Bound video was produced by Jamie Currie and Sky Swanson, and Melanie Jackson provided the vocals. Lou and Cindy Etgen provided the Arnold family photos.

1 International Space Station
2Soyuz is the Russian space capsule that all astronauts have been using since the decommissioning of the U.S. space shuttle program.
3The International Space Station is truly international, and Ricky’s team included Drew Feustral, an American astronaut and Oleg Artemyev, a Russian cosmonaut.
4NASA uses many to-do lists and the astronauts are incredible busy aboard the ISS. Long-term space travel results in significant loss of bone density, so astronauts spend a couple of hours each day exercising to slow down bone loss.
5When Ricky was on the ISS in 2009 as part of STS-119, the ISS team was interviewed by President Barack Obama and some school kids at the White House. The President asked Ricky what he missed during space travel and Ricky responded that he missed sleeping with a pillow. When he returned to NASA in Houston, he was welcomed by a giant pillow that the staff had provided for him.