AUSTIN, Texas — A live conversation with two astronauts cruising 250 miles above the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour is the very definition of a high-wire act, but NASA, Skype and the SXSW organizers pulled it off on Saturday.
NASA Mission Control pulled in the Ku-Band antenna transmission from the International Space Station and connected it to a laptop running Skype. The rest worked pretty much the way your own Skype communications work at home. According to John Yembrick, a NASA social media manager, this Internet-assisted direct communication with the ISS wasn't possible until fairly recently.
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"Show of hands, how many in the room have talked to space before?" Yembrick asked the audience during a SXSW panel called "How NASA is Changing the Way it Communicates with the World." Nobody raised their hands; everyone laughed.
Yembrick, who has spent the last six years building NASA's social media presence (on Twitter, from 1,000 followers in 2009 to 6.4 million today), said they tried pulling off a similar feat last year, but couldn't coordinate the astronauts' space schedules with those on the ground.
This year, Yembrick convinced astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Mike Hopkins to work during their weekend downtime to field questions from the several dozen attendees.
"We shouldn't picture a space station that is 'just up there.' I just think sometimes people don't grasp how awesome the space station is," Yembrick said.
Before the astronauts came online, Yembrick explained that his goal is to make the ISS relevant to everyone.
He recalled how NASA has used social media to tie interest in space to other terrestrial events and activities. For example, the hashtag #BlackHoleFriday launched on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. Throughout the day, NASA posted images of black holes on Instagram.
Most recently, NASA conducted a "Real Gravity" social media campaign during the Oscars telecast, during which the film Gravity won several Academy Awards.

Image: Mashable / Lance Ulanoff

"SXSW, we hear you loud and clear," the astronauts said. We've recapped some of the highlights from the Q&A, below (most is paraphrased).
Mike Hopkins: You can't really prepare for what it's like to float or be in microgravity all the time.
Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata: Yes, we were able to take pictures, very vivid ones. It's amazing to see air and water vapors coming out of volcanoes.
Hopkins: Sleeping up here is actually quite comfortable. In microgravity, there is no up or down. As for how we know when to go to bed, we're on GMT time and we follow the clock.
Wakata: I hope we don't smell very much in the space station. When Rick [Mastracchio] and Mike [Hopkins] came back in from space, I could smell the scent from the vacuum. Other than that, we have really very good air ventilation and circulation.
Hopkins: Earth. Space is amazing, but I'm getting ready to come home on Monday night. Really looking forward to feeling the earth between my toes, feeling a breeze, maybe even standing out in a rain storm.
Rick Mastracchio: No, but there is pressure. You're working on multi-billion [dollar] hardware. Something could go wrong or [you could] break something, and you feel like everyone is watching.
Hopkins: Mistakes are made all the time. Hopefully they're minor. We train for this all the time.
Mastracchio: Now we recycle everything. Urine, sweat, [it's all] purified and we drink it again. Air is recycled continuously. If we go to Mars, we can't carry all the weight for all the air and water we'll need to get there. It's too heavy.
If you want to spot the International Space Station as it travels over your neighborhood, you can follow along here.
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BONUS: 5 Facts You Didn't Know About Outer Space