When we asked astronaut Cady Coleman to speak to TED2011 from the International Space Station, she asked us: “Will I be able to see a little bit of TED?” We thought: awesome! Our video engineer George Riley talked us through the options in an email thrillingly titled “Watching TED2011 in space?” He writes:

We coordinated with NASA to make sure that they could handle the video file format and had the required bandwidth to upload video files to the space station. Then NASA had to schedule the upload of this video ‘payload’ to the space station. As we were live-streaming the event, we captured the stream to disk in an mp4 file and uploaded it to our archive on Akamai immediately after the session was completed. We provided NASA with their own account to download the video file directly from Akamai via FTP. And then NASA uploads the video to space station.

It worked — and here’s proof. Shuttle crew members above: Commander Scott Kelly, Cady Coleman and Michael Barratt; below, Paolo Nespoli, Oleg Skripochka and Coleman.