June 18^th, 2007—Astronaut Sunita Williams has packed her bags for the return trip to Earth as a member of the crew of Space Shuttle Atlantis. I use the term "pack her bags" loosely since she’ll have barely more than her tooth brush with her. Williams set the record for the longest spaceflight by a woman, but all she have to show for it after Thursday’s planned landing are the clothes on her back and two polo shirts with mission emblems stitched on.

The reason is weight. Atlantis carried up a thirty five thousand pound section of the International Space Station’s long external frame. That means the Shuttle doesn't have much room to carry extra weight up, or down.

As a result, most of Williams’ personal property on the station will stay there until the next Shuttle arrives in August. The astronauts will collect her gear and bring it back down. She won’t even be able to take the photo of her beloved dog named "Gorby". Williams says she stashed it somewhere for future crewmembers to find.

Waiting for one’s own baggage may be an inconvenience, but at least Williams should get her stuff back. Crewmembers who lived and worked aboard the older Russian Space Station MIR saw their property burn up and plummet into the Pacific Ocean when that outpost was de-orbited and allowed to fall into the atmosphere. Some of those items were inside the Spektr module. A runaway Progress robot cargo ship crashed into it and punctured the hull in 1998. The hatch between Spektr and the rest of MIR was slammed shut to save the station. Anything inside the depressurized compartment was gone forever.

When MIR burned up in the atmosphere, Astronaut Shannon Lucid lost dozens of books sent up by her children for her to read. Michael Foale lost a favorite pair of running shoes. But, perhaps most painful for the crew was the framed photo of Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. The picture hung in MIR’s kitchen and was left behind when the last crew departed.

Hopefully, Sunita Williams will get her picture of "Gorby" back.