Proud uncle welcomes NASA astronaut Chris Williams’ safe journey home

Before Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969, David Bowie famously sang a melancholy song about “Major Tom,” an astronaut who never made it home, floating into the galaxies, far from family.

Today my family is singing a joyful song — no “Major Tom,” here.

The NASA astronaut in our family is back on Earth.

Welcome home, Chris Williams.

Chris landed Sunday morning in Kazakhstan after traveling an extraordinary 102 million miles during eight months on the International Space Station. A recovery team then escorted my nephew to the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

It is amazing that ever-curious Chris, the son of Roger and Ginger, a child who wore a onesie with astronauts on it, now wears the U.S. flag on a real spacesuit.

Twice he floated in space. He was tethered to the space station while on space walks to repair robotic space arms on the space station. My mind was blown as I watched him live on the NASA channel.

Inside the space station he and fellow astronauts measured how eyes change in zero gravity. They checked on how the human brain orients its sense of direction in space. They also tracked bone density and DNA changes to gauge the impact a long space journey has on the human body.

In January, after a fellow American had to be evacuated due to illness, Chris began a month as the only American on the space station.

Then came another emergency. An air leak on the space station in early June prompted NASA to order Chris and four other astronauts out of the space station. They sheltered on a separate, smaller “Dragon” spacecraft. On Earth, his wife and children kept watch for two hours until the........

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