The International Space Station will host seven crew members throughout the holiday season, mostly for the laboratory that orbits the 20 years of life of the people on board.
The international team includes NASA astronauts Kate Rubins, Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover Jr. and Shannon Walker; Astronaut Soichi Noguchi of the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency; and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergey Ryzhikov.
The international crew will sit together for a special meal. Team members will also call home to talk to friends, family and loved ones.
“I’m very happy to be on the space station this year, because I’m going to share American traditions with my international crew colleagues,” Walker said in November.
“The year 2020 is a tough one, but it is also the year of perseverance and the year of resilience and I really hope that each of you cherishes every moment with friends and family,” Noguchi said in November. (The names of the Perseverance rover and the SpaceX Crew-1 Resilience Capsule, both launched this year, seem even more significant to the crew during the pandemic.)
Holidays away from Earth
Astronauts have marked the tradition of celebrating holidays in space since the days of the Apollo mission, when the Apollo 8 crew shared their famous Christmas Eve message on a live television broadcast in 1968, reading in turn from the Book of Genesis in the Bible.
How these holidays are marked and celebrated depends on each individual crew, and space veterans tend to share suggestions and ideas with beginners before boarding, NASA astronaut Dr. Andrew Morgan told CNN.
Morgan spent the entire holiday season on the space station in 2019 with crewmates Jessica Meir, Christina Koch, Alexander Skvortsov, Oleg Skripochka and Luca Parmitano.
In the days leading up to the holiday, Morgan and his team played Christmas music throughout the station and had classic holiday movies to create a festive atmosphere. The crew also used a projector with a recording of a Yule log on fire to make it look like they have a comfortable fireplace on the station, he said.
Given the international nature of their crew, they actually celebrated Christmas twice: Christmas on December 25th and Russian Orthodox Christmas on January 7th.
If your idea of planning ahead buys Christmas presents on Black Friday, it’s very different for astronauts who think ahead about their space mission, if that includes the holidays.
“We had to think a year or so in advance to make sure we bought, packaged and kept these gifts a secret all the time,” Morgan said.
Morgan knew that Parmitano was enjoying a special Russian delicacy called chocolate cheese, which is essentially a fat chocolate fudge, so Morgan saved a few to include with Parmitano’s gift. Morgan also offered each crew member a harmonica in the sock 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 lit only by candlelight. He grew up with this tradition and continues it with his family until today.
When he woke up on Christmas morning in the space station, all the lights were turned off in modules, a normal occurrence while astronauts sleep.
But Koch had taken small flashlights and covered them with gold tape to make them look like lighted candles. They were everywhere – in the lab, in the crew cabin, in the kitchen where the crew ate.
“When I saw that, I was choked with nostalgia,” Morgan said. “It made me think of missing my family during Christmas, but also just the thought of Christina’s gesture. She paid attention to this little detail and it was extremely significant. It is one of the many memories I cherish from the time spent in station space. . “
Many happy years
The space station operates in Greenwich Mean Time to meet a schedule. The crew witnesses 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets each day as they orbit the Earth at a speed of 17,500 miles per hour.
So when it comes time to say “Happy New Year,” the crew has a good chance of celebrating. They appeal to every control of the mission as the New Year reaches their time zone.
New Year’s Eve is a much bigger holiday than Christmas for the Russian crew, so the entire crew came together to enjoy a rich meal and toast until next year.
But the other great tradition involves watching a Russian film, which, when translated, essentially means “Irony of Fate.” The 1976 Soviet romantic comedy television film has “a bit of a bizarre plot about a gentleman who gets so drunk that he ends up in Leningrad and doesn’t know how he got there,” Morgan said.
It is a cultural phenomenon to watch the New Year’s Eve movie in Russia, so it is played in the Russian segment to honor the tradition.
“Experiencing this with our Russian team was very special,” Morgan said. “That exchange of traditions and the mutual experience of the holidays and the sharing of others in an international crew, this will be what I eliminate from that experience. It embodies all that is good in international cooperation and the sharing of traditions in different countries.”
Celebrating in isolation
While astronauts normally have the ability to send emails, make video conferences, and make phone calls, they have a little more time to do so so that they can connect with family during the holidays.
In 2020, it is also how families and friends connect as long as social distance is maintained.
“Although it’s not perfect, we still have a lot to recognize,” Morgan said. “We have the technology available to be part of each other’s holiday experiences, even if we are far away, whether it’s states, oceans or the Earth’s low orbit.”
It’s his first Thanksgiving home in 2018. Although he usually hosts astronauts and cosmonauts in Houston who are visiting for training, they can’t do that this year.
Morgan said the key to enjoying this holiday season is similar to the way astronauts celebrate in space: with planning, intention and attention.
Connect with people you haven’t contacted in a while, be thoughtful 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 some planning was needed, but it brought joy to loved ones.
Morgan also shared his desire for the current crew on the space station, as well as for everyone on Earth.
“As holidays separate from loved ones, so do most people on this planet right now,” Morgan said. “But this separation is over. The crew will return and be reunited, this pandemic will pass and we will all be reunited as human beings.”