Call for questions: Ask the station crew

Ever want to know what the moon looks like from low Earth orbit?

Or what it's like to float from one end of the International Space Station to another without touching the walls?

Or whether the astronauts ever have seen anything resembling alien spaceships on their orbital horizon?

Now's your chance.

Florida Today reporter Chris Kridler is fielding questions for a special space-to-ground interview next Monday with station skipper Michael Lopez-Alegria and flight engineer Sunita "Suni" Williams.

Lopez-Alegria is nearing the end of a seven-month stay aboard the outpost and is scheduled to return to Earth a week from today with Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin and billionaire space tourist Charles Simonyi.

Here's what he'll be bringing along with him: New U.S. records for the longest space mission (214 days), the greatest number of spacewalks performed in a career (10) and the greatest amount of time spent spacewalking (67 hours and 40 minutes).

Williams, who was ferried to the station aboard the orbiter Discovery in December, set a new U.S. record for most spacewalks by a woman (four) in February and also has tallied more time spacewalking than any other female astronaut (29 hours and 17 minutes).

She qualified for the Boston Marathon and will be running it on orbit Monday while the rest of the field trudges 26.2 miles along a historic course that starts in rural Hopkinton and ends up at Copley Square in downtown Boston.

Williams is facing a bit of an uncertain future. The first-time flyer had been scheduled to return to Earth in early and then late June aboard shuttle Endeavour. But efforts to repair the hail-damaged external tank of shuttle Atlantis has pushed that mission back to August at the earliest. Consequently, Williams stands to eclipse Lopez-Alegria's record for the longest U.S. space mission around July 11.

You can post your questions for the astronauts by clicking on Comments below, or you can e-mail Chris at ckridler@floridatoday.com. We're especially interested in questions from Kennedy Space Center workers, but we're fielding questions from everyone.

The space-to-ground interview is scheduled to take place at 6:10 p.m. Monday. The NASA TV broadcast of the event will be webcast live here in The Flame Trench.

IMAGE NOTE: Click to enlarge the NASA photo of International Space Station flight engineer Sunita "Suni" Williams (left) and Michael Lopez-Alegria suiting up for a spacewalk at the orbiting outpost. Photo credit: ISS flight engineer Mikhail Tyurin.