NASA Astronaut Captures An Haunting Footage of What 9/11 Looked Like From Space

Every year, September 11 triggers a harrowing memory in the minds of Americans. The date makes many of them recollect where they were on this day in 2001 when two hijacked airplanes crashed into the Twin Towers, causing a rumble so frightening that it still traumatizes the nation. But there was one American, the only one, who was not on Earth on this day. Frank Culbertson, a NASA astronaut, was hundreds of miles away from the planet, floating in the space station, pleasantly reading a book called The Sum of All Fears by Tom Clancy, a political thriller novel about terrorists. Little did he know, that while he was engaged in a fictional world of terrorism, an actual terrorist attack was thrashing his hometown into mounds of ash and rubble.

After receiving news from the engineers, he looked out of his window and was shattered to see smoke billowing from the spot plotted on the map as the location of the Twin Towers. At this time, his spaceship was hovering above New York City. So he grabbed his camera and along with his fellow astronauts, he recorded the distant appalling scene in video footage. The footage, shared by NASA, still makes people’s skin crawl with the eerie trauma of what happened that day. But while other Americans were busy watching the news on their television screens or fleeing away from the horrendous fire of the Twin Towers, Culbertson was photographing the scene from miles away.

At this time, Culbertson, an American aerospace engineer from South Carolina, was aboard the International Space Station (ISS) as part of NASA’s Expedition 3, whose crew also included two Russian cosmonauts. Lifting off from the Earth in August of the same year, Culbertson was tasked with doing spacewalks and studying protein crystals, space exercise and radiation detection in the orbiting laboratory of the ISS. But all these experiments aside, the deadly sight of 9/11 became the most-remembered highlight of their mission, unfortunately, a sad one.

The footage, though quite distant, shows a trail of white smoke swirling over the blue backdrop of Earth’s map. A zoomed-in scene then reveals a thick plume of smoke wafting from the brown ground, apparently from the location of the Twin Towers. While filming the sight, the astronaut was starting to “feel emotional” as he told NASA. The more he watched this happen from above, the more painful he felt, as if “seeing a wound in the side of your country.”

He revealed that the news of the 9/11 attack reached them via their flight surgeon. During a routine call on Earth, an operator said, “Well, Frank, we’re not having a very good day down here on Earth,” Culbertson shared with Kennedy Space Center. During their conversation, both the towers and the Pentagon were smacked as well as another plane crashed in Pennsylvania.

So he rushed to the craft’s window located in the Russian segment, took his photography equipment and started recording what was later determined to be the collapse of the second tower, from the top of Maine, 400 miles away from New York City. “I knew it was very bad because there was a big cloud of debris covering Manhattan,” he told NASA. “The weather was perfectly clear that day. I could easily see New York City – a big black column of smoke coming out of the city, and as I zoomed in with the video camera, I could see this big grey blob enveloping southern Manhattan” he recalled.

In a few minutes, as their craft reached above the Pentagon, he noticed something that looked like a “gash” on the city. As they were orbiting over Virginia, another gigantic cloud of smoke appeared on the camera screen, horrifying the astronauts, who were, after all, disconnected from all the chaos that had erupted on their home planet. A few days later, Culbertson shared a video of him playing "Taps" on a trumpet as a tribute to his friend, Charles "Chic" Burlingame, a fellow Naval Academy graduate who was killed in the Pentagon attack among thousands of other Americans.