The International Space Station will host seven crew members during the holiday season, the longest time humans have lived in a ship in 20 years for its transformative laboratory.
The international crew includes NASA astronauts Kate Rubins, Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover Jr. and Shannon Waker Kar; Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Sochi Noguchi; And Russian cosmonauts Sergei Kud-Sverkov and Sergei Ryazikov.
The international crew will sit together for a special meal. Team members will call home to talk with friends, family and loved ones.
“I am very happy to be on the space station this year because I share American traditions with my international crew colleagues,” Vaker Kare said in November.
“The year 2020 is a tough year, but it’s also a year of toughness and resilience, and I hope you, everyone, appreciate every moment with your friends and family,” Niochi said in November. (The names of Perseverance Rover and SpaceX Crew-1 Capsule Resilience, launched this year, seem more meaningful to the crew during the epidemic.)
Holidays away from the earth
Astronauts have marked the tradition of celebrating holidays in space since the days of the Ol Polo mission, when the Apollo 8 crew famously shared their next Christmas message by reading from the Bible in the book Genesis f Genesis in a live television broadcast in 1968.
How these holidays are marked and celebrated is up to each individual crew, and Naka astronaut Dr. Andrew Morgan told CNN that space giants share suggestions and ideas with interests.
Morgan spent the entire season of the Ravi season in 2019 with crew teammates Jessica Mir, Christina Coach, Alexander Schwartzov, Oleg Skripochka and Luka Permitano.
During the holidays, Morgan and his crew played Christmas music throughout the station and played classic holiday movies to create a festive atmosphere. The crew using a projector with a recording of a burning yul log made it look like they had a cozy fireplace at the station.
Given the international nature of their crew, they actually celebrated Christmas twice: Christmas on December 25 and Russian Orthodox Christmas on January 7.
If the idea of your next plan is to buy Christmas gifts on Black Friday, the astronauts are thinking ahead for their space mission, which includes the holidays is very different.
“We have to think about a year or more to make sure we buy, pack and keep these gifts all the time,” Morgan said.
Morgan knew that Permitano enjoyed a special Russian treat called Chocolate Cheese, which is essentially a heavy chocolate fudge, so Morgan was spared to save some with the presence of Permito. Morgan also gave each crumate a harmonica in their stockings so they could take a harmonica band in the morning.
Morgan was missing his family and was thinking about traditions he would usually share with them. One of her favorites is spending Christmas Eve lit by candlelight. He grew up with this tradition and continues to this day with his family.
When he woke up on Christmas morning at the space station, all the lights went off in the modules, a common occurrence when astronauts were asleep.
But the coach took small flashlights and covered them with gold colored tape to make them look like little burning candles. They were everywhere – in the lab, in the crew quarters, in the galley where the crew ate.
“When I saw it, I was really angry with the nostalgia,” Morgan said. “It makes me think about the loss of my family during Christmas, but also just the thoughtfulness of Christina’s gestures. She paid attention to it in a little detail, and it was very meaningful. It’s one of the many memories of my time on space. The station.”
Many happy new years
The space station is operating at Greenwich Mean Time to stick to the schedule. The crew witness 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every 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 many opportunities to celebrate. With the new year approaching their time zone they call every mission control.
The New Year is a much bigger holiday than Christmas for the Russian crew, so the whole crew came to dine together and had fun eating toast the following year.
But another great tradition involves watching a Russian film, which, when translated, means “colony of destiny.” Morgan said that in the 1976 Soviet romantic comedy “Come on Medie” television film, “a humble man who has a little strange plot about getting very drunk, ends up in Leningrad and doesn’t know how he got there.”
Watching a movie on New Year’s Eve in Russia is a cultural event, so it is performed in the Russian territory to honor the tradition.
“Experiencing with our Russian crew colleagues that it was special,” Morgan said. “Sharing those traditions and experiencing each other’s holidays and sharing them with each other on the international crew is what I take away from that experience. It’s all good about international collaboration and sharing traditions in different countries.”
Celebrating in solitude
While astronauts usually have the ability to send emails, make video conferences and make phone calls, they have a little more time to do this so they can connect with family during the holidays.
In 2020, it is also how families and friends are connecting because they have social distance to stay safe.
“It’s not perfect, though, we still have a lot left to be thankful for,” Morgan said. “We have the technology available to be part of each other’s holiday experiences, whether we’re far away, whether it’s in the states, in the oceans, or in low-Earth orbit.”
It is his first Thanksgiving home since 2018. While they usually host astronauts and cosmonauts in Houston who come for training, they may not be able to do so this year.
The key to enjoying this holiday season is similar to how astronauts celebrate in space: with planning, purpose and thoughtfulness, Morgan said.
“You connect with people you haven’t met in a while, be deliberately thoughtful and make small moves that have a big impact,” Morgan said.
He collected photos of his friends and family before going into space. In space, he took them to Coppola, where Earth is visible from the space station, and took photos of their loved ones with Earth as background. It was a simple thing, although it was a little planned, but enjoyed by her loved ones.
Morgan shared his wishes for the current crew on the space station as well as for everyone on Earth.
“Since they experience holidays separate from loved ones, there are also a lot of people on the planet right now,” Morgan said. “But that uniqueness is limited. The crew will come back and reunite, the epidemic will pass, and we will all meet again as humans.”
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