The International Space Station will host seven crew members for the holiday season, the most ever for the orbiting lab in the 20 years that humans have lived on board.
The international crew consists of NASA astronauts Kate Rubins, Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover Jr. and Shannon Walker; Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi; and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Ryzhikov.
The international crew joins in for a special meal. The team members will also call home to talk to friends, family and loved ones.
“I am very happy to be on the Space Station this year as I can share American traditions with my international crewmembers,” Walker said in November.
“The year 2020 is a difficult year, but it is also the year of persistence and the year of resilience and I really hope you will cherish every moment with your friends and family,” Noguchi said in November. (The names of the Perseverance rover and the SpaceX Crew-1 capsule Resilience, both launched this year, seem even more meaningful to the crew during the pandemic.)
Vacation away from the earth
Astronauts have marked the tradition of celebrating vacations in space since the days of the Apollo mission, when the Apollo 8 crew famously shared their Christmas Eve message on a live television broadcast in 1968 by taking turns reading from the book of Genesis in the Bible.
How these holidays are marked and celebrated is up to each individual crew, and space veterans tend to share suggestions and ideas with rookies before going upstairs, NASA astronaut Dr. Andrew Morgan on CNN.
Morgan spent the entire holiday season in 2019 on the space station with crew members Jessica Meir, Christina Koch, Alexander Skvortsov, Oleg Skripochka and Luca Parmitano.
In the days leading up to the holidays, Morgan and his crew played Christmas music all over the station and played classic holiday movies to create a festive atmosphere. The crew also used a projector with a recording of a burning Christmas log to make it look like they had a cozy fireplace at the station, he said.
Given the international nature of their crew, they actually celebrated Christmas twice: Christmas on December 25 and Russian Orthodox Christmas on January 7.
If your idea of planning ahead is to buy Christmas gifts on Black Friday, it’s very different for astronauts thinking ahead of their space mission if it includes holidays.
“We had to think about a year or more in advance to make sure we were buying, wrapping and keeping these gifts a secret all the time,” Morgan said.
Morgan knew Parmitano was enjoying a special Russian treat called chocolate cheese, which is essentially a heavy chocolate toffee, so Morgan saved some to put with Parmitano’s gift. Morgan also gave each crew member a harmonica in their stocking so they could have a harmonica band on board.
Morgan missed his family and thought about the traditions he would normally share with them. One of his favorites is to spend Christmas Eve alone by candlelight. He grew up with this tradition and continues it with his family to this day.
When he woke up in the space station on Christmas morning, all the lights in the modules were off, which is normal when the astronauts are asleep.
But Koch had brought small flashlights and covered them with gold-colored tape to make them look like burning candles. They were everywhere – in the lab, the crew quarters, the galley where the crew eat.
“When I saw that, I was really suffocated with nostalgia,” Morgan said. “It made me think about missing my family over Christmas, but also the thoughtfulness of Christina’s gesture. She had paid attention to that little detail, and it was extremely meaningful. It is one of the many memories I have of my time in space. drive. “
Happy New Year
The Space Station operates at Greenwich Mean Time to adhere to a schedule. The crew witnesses 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets orbiting the Earth every day at a speed of 17,500 miles per hour.
So when it comes time to say ‘Happy New Year’, the crew has plenty of opportunities to celebrate. They call every mission control when the new year arrives in their time zone.
New Year is a much bigger holiday than Christmas for the Russian crew, so the entire crew gathered to enjoy a sumptuous meal and toast to the year ahead.
But the other great tradition is watching a Russian movie, which, when translated, essentially means ‘The Irony of Fate’. The 1976 romantic-comedy television movie has “a bit of a bizarre plot about a gentleman who gets so drunk he ends up in Leningrad and doesn’t know how he got there,” Morgan said.
It is a cultural phenomenon to watch the film in Russia on New Year’s Eve, so it is played in the Russian segment to honor the tradition.
“To experience that with our Russian crew was extra special,” said Morgan. “That exchange of those traditions and experiencing each other’s holidays and sharing that with each other through an international team, that’s what I’ll get from that experience. It embodies all the good things about international cooperation and the sharing of traditions between different countries.”
Just celebrate
While the astronauts normally have the ability to send emails, video conference and make phone calls, they are given a little more time to do these so they can connect with their families while on vacation.
2020 is also how families and friends connect with each other while staying at a social distance to stay safe.
“While it’s not perfect, we still have a lot to be thankful for,” Morgan said. “We have the technology available to be part of each other’s vacation experiences, even though we are far apart, whether in states, oceans or from low Earth orbit.”
It is his first Thanksgiving home since 2018. Although Houston usually receives astronauts and cosmonauts who visit for training, they cannot do so this year.
Morgan said the key to enjoying this holiday season is similar to how the astronauts celebrate in space: with planning, intention, and thoughtfulness.
Connect with people you haven’t reached in a while, be deliberately considerate, and make small gestures that have a big impact, Morgan said.
Before going into space, he collected photos of his friends and family. In space, he took them to the dome, where the Earth is visible from the space station, and took pictures of his loved ones with the Earth as a background. It was a simple thing, although it took some planning, but it brought joy to his loved ones.
Morgan also shared his wish for the current crew on the space station and for everyone on Earth.
“Just as they live the holidays apart from loved ones, so are most people on this planet now,” Morgan said. “But that separation is finite. The crew will return and be reunited, this pandemic will be over, and we will all be reunited as humans.”