Michigan’s Christina Koch is Coming Home Tomorrow Morning

Michigan's own Christina Koch, after spending the last 328 days in space on the International Space Station, the longest single spaceflight by a woman, will return to Earth tomorrow morning.

Christina (who was born in Grand Rapids) has had a big (almost) year in space. She participated in six spacewalks, including the first all-female spacewalk. And she provided a ton of data to NASA so they can figure out how the human body will react to long space voyages - like missions to Mars.

NASA says her trip home will start tonight at around 9 p.m when Christina and two of her fellow astronauts, one from Italy and one from Russia, will climb into the Soyuz capsule that will take them home. They'll close the hatch on the capsule at 9:30, undock from the ISS at 12:50 a.m and deorbit a little after 3 a.m. Landing in Kazakhstan is scheduled for 4:12 a.m our time. All of this will be available to watch online on NASA-TV.

I watched a little bit of a press conference Christina did this morning. She was asked what she would miss most about being in space. Christina says she'll miss the crew she's been in space with because they've become like family. She then floated upside down and said she'd also miss micro-gravity. As a kid who woke up and watched every manned rocket launch until I was way into adulthood - I just smiled.

Can't wait to see that first press conference from Mars.

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