Astronauts remember watching 9/11 happen -- from space

Culbertson described being “flabbergasted, then horrified” by the news. He noticed the space station was just about to pass over New England, and rushed to try to see.

“I zipped around the station until I found a window that would give me a view of NYC and grabbed the nearest camera,” Culbertson wrote. “The smoke seemed to have an odd bloom to it at the base of the column that was streaming south of the city. After reading one of the news articles we just received, I believe we were looking at NY around the time of, or shortly after, the collapse of the second tower. How horrible.”