When astronauts return to Earth, they usually have a chance to sit down and get used to Earth’s gravity again. Falling through the atmosphere can make for a bumpy ride, so after being pulled from their capsule, crew members are taken to a holding room where they can relax while doctors perform routine checkups.

Jessica Meir’s return was different.

Shortly after Meir landed on April 17 after more than 200 days in space, she was placed aboard a helicopter for a three-hour flight to the city of Baikonur in southern Kazakhstan. From there, Meir and her NASA colleague Andrew Morgan spent another three hours en route to a nearby city for their return flight to Houston.

“We called it the plane, train and car version of trying to get home,” Meir said.

The drastic measures were taken because of the coronavirus pandemic, which Meir, Morgan and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka monitored from the International Space Station until they returned home this month. Border closures and other travel restrictions caused by the pandemic forced NASA and the Russian space agency to change the usual recovery process.

Meir returned to a different world than the one she had left about seven months ago.

“I wasn’t really ready to leave,” Meir said. “I would have liked to stay up there longer and, above all, to return to a completely different planet than the one we returned to. It’s an interesting transition.”

Back in the U.S., Meir and Morgan quarantined for a week at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. A brief separation is normal, but since astronauts on long-duration space flights typically experience changes in their immune systems, NASA imposed an extended quarantine to protect the two astronauts from earth-bound pathogens.

“Something about the environment during spaceflight has a direct impact on our immune systems and so they wanted to be extra careful about what we were exposed to first when we returned,” Meir said, adding that returning astronauts were physiologically similar to people with weakened immune systems.

Still, she said, returning home made the pandemic more real for her. Although she had access to news aboard the space station and was in regular contact with loved ones, the crew’s daily routine continued largely without interruption.

“It was really a stark contrast because of course the Earth didn’t look any different to us,” she said. “It looked just as magnificent, just as stunning as it did before. And then to think about what was going on on the surface and that every person, all 7.5 billion people on the planet, were affected by it and only three of us who were in space at the time were unaffected. It was also really hard to comprehend that we were the only three people whose lives it didn’t affect in some way.”

However, Meir said looking back at the planet from the station’s orbit offers a unique perspective on the developing situation, and she cited examples of astronauts who were in space during other major historical events, including the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“During the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was actually a cosmonaut on a space station. He had launched as a Soviet citizen and then came back carrying a flag that actually no longer existed,” Meir said. “But this was even more extreme, in my opinion, because it affected literally every person, every country.”

Meir left NASA quarantine last week, but now finds herself in a different form of social isolation — one that people around the world have been struggling with for weeks, and in some cases months.

Meir, who describes herself as a “hug type,” was looking forward to reconnecting with family and friends, but those plans are on hold. And while her training has taught her to cope with isolation — she lives and works 250 miles above the planet in an orbiting lab about the length of a football field — the experience of social distancing on Earth is markedly different.

“It’s just very different here because you’re not used to being isolated on Earth,” she said. “That’s not how our society is set up. So for me, it’s a lot harder to deal with, especially after being away for so long.”

But despite the surprise of returning to Earth during a global health crisis, Meir described her mission as a dream come true. During her 205 days in space, Meir made history in October when she participated in NASA’s first all-female spacewalk alongside fellow astronaut Christina Koch.

At the time, Meir was primarily focused on completing all the complicated steps of the spacewalk, but she said the outpouring of public support that followed helped her and Koch understand the significance of the milestone.

“It would have been an incredible spacewalk no matter who I walked out the door with,” she said. “But we really realized how important this was as an event, how remarkable it was for people – actually much more than I ever expected. I was really overwhelmed by that response, and that was very humbling and it really meant a lot to us.”