The three will be up there for months, joining National Aeronautics and Space Administration astronauts Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan, alongside Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka.

Meir, Morgan and Skripochka will return to Earth next week to a very different world from the one they left.

Coronavirus has forced both NASA and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, to change the ways they send people into space.

Astronauts normally go into quarantine a couple of weeks before a launch, as you do not want to take a cold or something like gastro into space.

This week, the Kazakhstan launch had less staff than usual and families were prevented from attending. Further limitations in line with social distancing and travel restriction were also implemented.

Moreover, rocket launches across the globe are on indefinite hold because of coronavirus.

A United States company which launches from New Zealand, Rocket Lab had a scheduled launch in late-March. In line with the NZ government's coronavirus prevention lock down, that launch is now on hold.

The launch is planned to carry satellites for a US university and the US National Reconnaissance Office.

It also has a Canberra satellite, the M2 Pathfinder satellite, built in collaboration between University NSW Canberra Space and the Australian government.

That launch, nicknamed "Don't Stop Me Now" is a homage to the Queen song by the same name.

The company said it was "in recognition of Rocket Lab board member and avid Queen fan Scott Smith, who recently passed away". That mission name now has an entirely different meaning.

Likewise, more than 90 telescopes and observatories spanning six continents around the world are currently closed due to coronavirus.

In Australia, in line with the Australian National University's decision to close its campuses, Mount Stromlo Observatory and Siding Spring Observatory are closed through June.

At Siding Spring Observatory only a few robotic telescopes are open, as they do not require people to be there to operate them.

Australia's largest optical telescope, the Anglo-Australian Telescope, some remotely-operated and robotic telescopes including SkyMapper, as well as more than a dozen others are also closed.

Telescope closures are more than just not looking to the heavens for three months. Numerous projects, including multi-year hundred-person projects, the final data a PhD student needs to graduate and undergraduates' educations are put on hold.

When facilities eventually re-open, it is not as simple as just jumping in to make-up missed observations.

Telescopes are scheduled approximately six months in advance and require an application process. If you miss your nights you have to restart the whole process. In some cases this means waiting a whole year.

While weather often impacts observations, we usually mitigate this by asking for a few nights spread out over weeks or months, not three to four months.

Even if telescopes open up at the end of June, lots of objects are only visible for part of the year, so it means waiting.

It is also impacting other planets. Last month, the European Space Agency and Roscosmos announced their rover set to launch to Mars in July was delayed, in part due to travel restrictions around coronavirus. It has now slipped to the next launch window in 2022.

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