A U2 concert in Seattle this week officially sailed "out-of-this-world" when NASA astronaut Mark Kelly made an appearance from space in a pre-recorded message.
On Sunday (June 5) at Quest Field in Seattle, U2 lead singer Bono dedicated the song "Beautiful Day" to Kelly's wife Gabrielle Giffords, a Congresswoman from Arizona who was wounded during a January shooting.
The song holds special significance to Giffords, as she chose it to play as the wakeup song one morning during Kelly's recent trip on the space shuttle Endeavour's final mission.
"Imagine a man looking down on us from 200 miles up," Bono said during the concert, part of U2's U2360° world tour. "Looking down at our beautiful crowded planet… What would he say to us? What is on your mind Commander Kelly?"
Kelly held up a series of floating letters to spell out a message, including the words "It's a beautiful day," while floating inside the International Space Station during Endeavour's STS-134 mission. [Video: Astronaut Mark Kelly in U2 Concert]
"Hello Seattle … from the International Space Station," Kelly said. He finished his message with a line from David Bowie's song "Space Oddity:" "I'm looking forward to coming home. Tell my wife I love her very much. She knows."
This wasn't the first time an astronaut had rocked out in a U2 concert.
In 2009 and 2010, U2 played videos from the space station's Expedition 20 crew during its concerts. And in November 2009, Bono, his sons and bandmate The Edge visited Mission Control in Houston to make a call up to the space station astronauts.
Kelly and his five crewmates landed safely at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on June 1.
Endeavour spent 16 days visiting the International Space Station to deliver a $2 billion space particle detector and spare supplies for the orbiting laboratory. NASA has one more space shuttle mission planned — the July 8 flight of Atlantis — before the shuttles are retired for good.
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