Play is essential to human well-being, especially in space travel.

Even in packed schedules, astronauts make room for play.

Regarding planet Earth from near-earth orbit offers perspective on threat and hope.

Amidst chaos and grave miscalculation back on the planet, three American astronauts and one Canadian aboard the historic moonshot received a congratulatory phone call from an embattled U.S. president. As the commander-in-chief strayed into a digression about the hockey hall-of-famer Wayne Gretzky, whom he called a “great friend,” eyeballs drifted away from the pro-forma remarks to the microphone itself as the object floated and then floated some more during a long minute of silence, a technical glitch.

Waiting for the conversation to resume, the astronauts toyed with the mike.

Of course, the mike didn’t drop the way it would have if released by a celebrating stand-up comedian. Instead, they let it swim, twirled it, poked it, and steadied it improbably in free-fall, delighting in its zero-gravity wandering, juggling in slo-mo. Mission Specialist Christina Koch seemed especially close to failing to hold in a laugh.

Lost in Play in Space

A similar buoyancy erupted more than half a century earlier when two Apollo 17 astronauts, weighing one-sixth what they would on Earth and hopping about, joined in a goofy parody of an old song: “I was strolling on the moon one day, in the merry merry month of May .…” The voice from Houston cut in with a correction, “sorry about that, guys, but today may be........

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