Chris Hadfield / CSA via Twitter

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield passed along this picture of Boston at night, as seen from the International Space Station, in recognition of the city's tragedy.

Monday's Boston Marathon bombing prompted expressions of sympathy from humanity's farthest-flung outpost: the International Space Station.

"Our crew just heard about the horrible events at the Boston Marathon," the space station's commander, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, wrote in a Twitter update. "We all pass along our condolences and thoughts to everyone affected."

Later, Hadfield tweeted a picture of the city at night in recognition of "a somber spring night in Boston."

Even though the space station wheels around our planet at a height of 230 miles (370 kilometers) or so, the crew stays in touch with earthly news through official NASA communications as well as Internet links that make use of the space agency's TDRS satellite network. For example, the space station has been receiving a digital version of NBC Nightly News for years.

All that altitude gives the station's crew a unique perspective on Earth's tragedies. On Sept. 11, 2001, NASA astronaut Frank Culbertson looked down on the smoke streaming from the wreckage of New York's World Trade Center. "It was like seeing a wound in the side of your country, of your family, your friends," he said years later. Last October, astronauts watched as Superstorm Sandy blasted its way toward the East Coast.

The horrible events in Boston may not have been visible from space — but Hadfield's tweets demonstrate how we connect during times of tragedy, even when we're off the planet.

More perspectives from space:

• A space memorial for Newtown
• Last shuttle descent seen from orbit
• Awesome space views of typhoon

John Brecher / msnbc.com

A crowd in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle watches NASA's Super Guppy aircraft approach Boeing Field, carrying a key piece of a space shuttle mockup that will go on display at Seattle's Museum of Flight.

SEATTLE — It may not be a real space shuttle, but it's ours.

Today NASA delivered a key piece of the mockup that astronauts used for space shuttle practice to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, my hometown. And it arrived aboard one of the most ungainly-looking airplanes ever built. The wingless mockup is known as the Full Fuselage Trainer, or FFT. The plane has a nickname that's more colorful: the Super Guppy.

The Super Guppy looks more like a Super Whale. The wide-body turboprop airplane has a cargo hold that's been built up into a bulbous shape, specifically to carry big stuff for outer space. Only five of the Guppies were ever produced, and they were used to cart spacecraft components around for the Gemini, Apollo, Skylab and shuttle programs. This Super Guppy is the only one of its kind still flying, and this week's odyssey with the most important piece of the Full Fuselage Trainer is one of the highest-profile flights the plane has ever taken.

For decades, the plywood-built FFT sat in a building at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. The crew compartment — the part of the structure that was flown to Seattle today — was outfitted with all the buttons, switches, cockpit displays and middeck lockers that the real shuttles had. None of those gadgets worked, but they helped the astronauts get familiar with the layout before they started handling the real controls. Astronauts could also practice how they'd get out of the shuttle in the event of a landing-strip emergency.

With the end of the space shuttle era, NASA's Johnson Space Center no longer needed the FFT, so the space agency decided to donate it for display. The Seattle museum made a play for one of the flown shuttles, and even built a shuttle-sized, 15,500-square-foot Space Gallery to display it in. But Seattle lost out to Florida, California, New York and the "other Washington" in the competition for Atlantis, Endeavour, Enterprise and Discovery. The Full Fuselage Trainer served as the consolation prize.

Most of the FFT's plywood parts could be shipped up by traditional means for later assembly, but the shuttle crew compartment had to be transported all in one piece. That's why NASA's Super Guppy was called into service.

The airplane has a 25-foot-high, 25-foot-wide, 111-foot-long cargo compartment — big enough to hold the mockup's most awkward piece, even when it's bound up in shrink wrap and a protective steel frame. Over the past couple of days, the Super Guppy has been making a journey from its home at Ellington Air Force Base in Texas, over to California, and then up to Seattle at a top speed of around 200 knots. It wasn't exactly a record-setting pace — but what the Super Guppy lacks in speed, it more than makes up for in the "What the Heck Is That?" department.

The Guppy flew over my hometown and its surroundings with a Seattle-born astronaut, Greg Johnson, at the controls. Then it floated down to a landing right in front of the museum, which is adjacent to Boeing Field. One of the commentators at the museum called it a "beautifully ugly airplane."

Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire pointed to the craft with pride as the sky spit down rain. "When we get together in Washington state, we can land the big whale right behind me," she said.

Museum of Flight

NASA's Super Guppy and a chase plane fly above the mostly cloudy skies of Seattle.

Museum of Flight

After its touchdown at Seattle's Boeing Field, the turboprop-powered Super Guppy taxis over to the Museum of Flight next door.

Museum of Flight

The entire front of the Super Guppy swings open to reveal the cargo inside.

Museum of Flight

The 65,000-pound Tunner 60K aircraft cargo loader and transporter rolls toward the Super Guppy.

Museum of Flight

The cargo compartment for the Full Fuselage Trainer, wrapped in protective plastic, has been taken out of the Super Guppy for a short ride on the Tunner transporter to its new home in the Museum of Flight's Charles Simonyi Space Gallery.

Several thousand onlookers watched as the Super Guppy's entire front opened up to the side like a four-story-high door. 

"It's really cool that it's actually able to fly," Allison Kirkman, a 10-year-old student at Spirit Ridge Elementary School in Bellevue, Wash., told me as she watched from the tarmac. "It's an amazing plane, and how they built it is cool, too."

The shrink-wrapped shuttle crew compartment was moved out of the wide-yawning Super Guppy onto a 65,000-pound mobile transporter, then rolled over to the museum's Charles Simonyi Space Gallery. Over the next couple of months, the shuttle mockup will be assembled in a place of honor, alongside a Russian Soyuz capsule and a prototype lander that was used in Blue Origin's spacecraft development program. Museumgoers like Kirkman will be able to walk through the shuttle mockup's cargo bay — and they might even be able to crawl through the crew compartment, just like the astronauts did.

Kids, prepare to be amazed ... again.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

GeoEye

A satellite picture of Pearl Harbor, acquired by the GeoEye-1 satellite on Sept. 24, shows the USS Missouri docked at Battleship Row as a museum ship, with its bow pointing toward the USS Arizona memorial at lower right. The wreck of the Arizona can be seen below the white memorial, barely visible beneath the water's surface.

Seventy years after a "date which will live in infamy," this satellite image of Pearl Harbor shows the symbols of a war's beginning and end.

The symbol of the end is more evident: The USS Missouri sits at its dock at Ford Island in the Hawaiian harbor, serving as a museum ship. In 1945, the "Mighty Mo" was the stage for the formal Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. After almost a half-century of service, the battleship was decommissioned for good in 1992 and took its place on Pearl Harbor's Battleship Row in 1998.

The Missouri wasn't even afloat on Dec. 7, 1941, when Japanese airplanes bombed the harbor and drew the United States into the war. But the battleship Arizona was. In the picture above, snapped by the GeoEye-1 satellite, the outlines of the Arizona are barely visible at upper right, beneath the surface of the water. The USS Arizona Memorial is the white structure sitting above the ship.

GeoEye-1, a polar-orbiting satellite operated by the GeoEye commercial venture, focused on Pearl Harbor on Sept. 24 from a height of 423 miles as it sped over the scene at 17,000 mph.

The scene was quite different in 1941, on what President Franklin Roosevelt dubbed a day of infamy. The aerial photograph you see below, taken from U.S. Navy archives, shows the wreckage in the harbor on Dec. 10, 1941, three days after the attack. Dark trails of oil stream from the dead and damaged ships. From this altitude, you get a sense of the attack's toll on the U.S. fleet, but not of the human cost: 2,390 Americans killed, 1,178 wounded.   

U.S. Navy

This aerial photograph of Pearl Harbor's Battleship Row was captured on Dec. 10, 1941, after the Japanese attack. The sunken USS California is at upper left. The capsized Oklahoma and the Maryland are at left center, the sunken West Virginia and the lightly damaged Tennessee are at lower center, The sunken Arizona is at lower right, in the same position where it lies today. Dark streaks of oil stream from the damaged vessels.

Today, veterans, family members and dignitaries are gathering at Pearl Harbor to commemorate the 70th anniversary. Flags are flying at half-staff. And Americans are looking back at the events of 1941 from a remote perspective, as if from a great height.

These views of Pearl Harbor serve as a somber entry in the Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar, which puts a spotlight on views of Earth from outer space every day from now until Christmas. Click on the links below for more about Pearl Harbor Day, as well as other images from the calendar:

Pearl Harbor coverage:

• Last witnesses: Memories of Pearl Harbor
• A historical look back at the Day of Infamy
• Pearl Harbor veteran recalls bewilderment of attack
• After death, Pearl Harbor survivor returns to his ship
• How Pearl Harbor Day is being commemorated
• Pearl Harbor memories live on in New Orleans exhibit
• Video: Survivors gather to recall Pearl Harbor attacks
• Search msnbc.com for articles about 'Pearl Harbor'
• Pearl Harbor pictures from the Naval History and Heritage Command

More space views from the calendar:

• Dec. 6: Streaking for home
• Dec. 5: Antarctica stripped naked
• Dec. 4: The monster of Madagascar
• Dec. 3: Santa's shrinking domain
• Dec. 2: The masses in Mecca
• Dec. 1: An ornament in outer space
• The full Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar
• Hubble calendar, from The Atlantic's In Focus
• 2011 Zooniverse Advent calendar