The International Space Station will host seven crew members throughout the holiday season, the largest for the laboratory in orbit in its 20 years of human life on board.
The international crew includes 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 will sit down to a special meal together. 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 can share American traditions with my international crewmates,” Walker said in November.
“2020 is tough, but it’s also the year of perseverance and resilience and I hope each of you loves every moment with your 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 space holidays 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 reading the book of Genesis in the Bible.
How these holidays are celebrated and celebrated depends on each crew, and space veterans tend to share suggestions and ideas with newbies before they go up, NASA astronaut Dr. Andrew Morgan told CNN.
Morgan spent the entire holiday season at the space station in 2019 alongside crewmates 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 throughout the season and had classic holiday movies to create a festive atmosphere. The crew also used a projector with a recording of a Yule log on to show they had a cozy fireplace at the station, he said.
Given the international character of their crew, they actually celebrated Christmas twice: Christmas on December 25th and Russian Orthodox on January 7th.
If your idea of planning ahead is to buy Christmas presents on Black Friday, it’s very different for astronauts to think about the space mission if it includes vacations.
“We had to think a year or so in advance to make sure we bought, packaged and kept these secrets a secret all the time,” Morgan said.
Morgan knew that Parmitano enjoyed a special Russian delicacy called chocolate cheese, which is essentially a heavy chocolate cream, so Morgan saved some to include with Parmitano’s gift. Morgan also gave all the teammates 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 the Christmas Eve just lit by candles. He grew up with this tradition and continues it with his family to this day.
When he woke up on Christmas morning at the space station, all the lights went out in the modules, which is normal while the astronauts are asleep.
But Koch had taken some small lanterns and covered them with golden ribbon to make them look like little lighted candles. They were everywhere: in the lab, in the crew quarters, in the galley where the crew eats.
“When I saw this, I drowned in nostalgia,” Morgan said. “It made me think of missing my family over Christmas, but also just the reflection of Christina’s gesture. I had paid attention to this little detail and it was extremely significant. It’s one of the many memories I cherish of my stay. in space station “.
Very happy New Year
The space station operates at Greenwich Mean Time to meet a schedule. The crew is witnessing 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets each day around the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour.
So when it comes time to say “Happy New Year,” the crew has a good chance of celebrating. They make calls to each mission control when the new year arrives in their time zone.
New Year’s Eve is a much bigger holiday than Christmas for the Russian crew, so the entire crew gathered to enjoy a hearty meal and toast for next year.
But the other great tradition is to see a Russian film, which, when translated basically, means “The irony of fate.” The 1976 Soviet romantic comedy television film has “a strange plot about a gentleman who gets so drunk, who ends up in Leningrad and doesn’t know how he got there,” Morgan said.
It is a cultural phenomenon to see the film on New Year’s Eve in Russia, so it is reproduced in the Russian segment to respect tradition.
“Experiencing this with our Russian crewmates was very special,” Morgan said. “That exchange of these traditions and the experience of the holidays of others and sharing it with others in an international crew, will be what I will draw from this experience. It incorporates all the good of international cooperation and the sharing of traditions. between different countries “.
Celebrating in isolation
While astronauts usually have the ability to send emails, make video conferences, and make phone calls, they have a little more time to make them so they can connect with family during the holidays.
In 2020, it’s also how families and friends connect as they distance themselves 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 the vacation experiences of others, even if we are very far apart, whether in states, oceans or in low Earth orbit.”
It’s their first Thanksgiving home since 2018. While they usually host astronauts and cosmonauts in Houston who visit training, they can’t do it this year.
Morgan said the key to enjoying this holiday is similar to the way astronauts celebrate in space: with planning, intention, and reflection.
Connect with people you haven’t reached out to in a long time, be deliberately thoughtful, and make small gestures that make a big impact, Morgan said.
Before going to 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 their loved ones with the Earth as a backdrop. It was a simple thing, although it needed some planning, but it brought joy to your loved ones.
Morgan also shared his wish for the current space station crew, as well as for everyone on Earth.
“As they live the holidays apart from loved ones, so do most people on this planet,” Morgan said. “But this separation is finite. The crew will come back and reunite, this pandemic will pass and we will all come together as human beings.”