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The first six weeks of Scott Kelly's marathon year aboard the International Space Station (ISS) haven't been easy. There was the reacclimation to zero-gravity, the failure of a Russian cargo ship carrying needed supplies, the cancellation of singer Sarah Brightman's planned visit-to say nothing of the constant, minute-by-minute work schedule that is the stuff of any day aboard the station.

Kelly and astronaut Terry Virts discussed those things and more in one of at least four video chats TIME will conduct with the ISS during our exclusive Year in Space coverage.

National Geographic Channel is taking viewers around the world-literally-in this spectacular two-hour television event broadcasting LIVE from the International Space Station (ISS) and Mission Control in Houston, Texas. Made in collaboration with NASA, we'll go into orbit with astronauts Rick Mastracchio and Koichi Wakata as they fly at 17,500 mph nearly 250 miles above the earth's surface on the International Space Station, while astronaut Mike Massimino joins host Soledad O'Brien on the ground at Mission Control in Houston. From space, Mastracchio and Wakata will give viewers a fully guided tour, showing us how they live for months in microgravity. They'll conduct never-before-broadcast experiments that demonstrate the real-world value of the science conducted on the floating laboratory. Plus get ready for stunning shots of Earth, from sunset and sunrise, to city lights and green aurora, to lightning storms and shooting stars. You've never seen our planet like this before.

Kelly and astronaut Terry Virts discussed those things and more in one of at least four video chats TIME will conduct with the ISS during our exclusive Year in Space coverage. Phoning the station is not easy. It takes days of planning and at least an hour of sound checks before the uplink is made, and then long delays as questions and answers are relayed back and forth. It makes ordinary conversation a challenge.

Still, even in the 14 minutes the connection lasted-during which the station passed over Canada, the Great Lakes, Minneapolis, Denver, and Southern California-Kelly and Virts were surprisingly open, sharing their feelings about both the camaraderie and the sublime loneliness of being where they are. Kelly especially must be mindful of those feelings as he faces 10 more months of circling the Earth, while his family and friends and everything he knows lie 250 miles below him.

After 30 years of missions, NASA finally retired its aging space fleet in 2011. Since then, they've been dependent on Russian capsules to take Americans to and from the ISS, at the prohibitive cost of about $70 billion per astronaut. But recently signed deals with Boeing and SpaceX are supposed to fill the gap, using commercial spacecraft to transport station personnel. Much of the maintenance shown in Wilmore and Virt's video is in preparation for these commercial flights, which are meant to commence in 2017. The footage was intended to give future astronauts an idea of what working on the station would be like when they arrived. Here is a short edit of the clips from the AP:  

"An extraordinary timelapse video created with pictures from the International Space Station shows Earth as it has never been seen before. The video, called Further Up Yonder, was made by Italian film student Giacomo Sardelli using Nasa stills. Sardelli calls the film a message from the ISS to all humankind "

A video from a female astronaut on the International Space Station showing how she washes her hair.