Adrian Lane of Gloucestershire, England, got in touch with the International Space Station the other day. Thanks to impeccable timing and a prime location under the ISS's path above the Earth, Lane was able to have a brief conversation with space station's crew via ham radio. It must be surreal to have a casual chat with humans who are floating up there in the void, but technologically, it's really not even that hard.  

The use of amateur-grade ham radio as a means to talk to Earth from spaces goes back decades to when astronaut Owen Garriott brought a handheld ham radio with him as part of the Shuttle Amateur Radio Experiment(SAREX) and used it to chat with students and other amateur radio while careening around the Earth at 17,000 mph. 

Since then, the SAREX project has evolved into Amateur Radio on the International Space Station (ARISS), which maintains a ham radio station on the ISS that astronauts can use to chat with radio (and space) enthusiasts back here on the blue marble. There are two ways to get in touch. ARISS will schedule astronaut chat-time for schools or other educational organizations, but you can also just try your luck. Ham-licensed astronauts on the ISS can spend their downtime at the station's ham setup just chatting with Earthlings at random, and if you time it right, you could make contact. 

Whether you'd be so lucky depends on a number of factors, like whether the astronauts are awake at the time, and whether they're busy doing other important space-work. That, and you just have to be in range. Not only does the ISS criss-cross the spinning globe in its orbit, its also moving insanely fast at a speed of nearly 5 miles per second. Those two factors combined make windows of communication with the ISS rare and fleeting for any particular point on Earth. 

During his four-minute window, Adrian Lane managed to chat with the astronauts on the space station for a brief 50 seconds. The conversation was brief and unremarkable. According to The Telegraph, he asked what space was like and they responded that it was dark; the outer-space equivalent of talking about the weather. "I was buzzing," Lane said. "It's not every day you get to talk to some guy out in space." And the fact that just about anyone with a ham radio can give it a shot is nothing short of incredible. 

You can find more technical details about the process on the website for the ARISS. And if you're going to try it out, good luck!