Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

NASA astronauts offer Thanksgiving messages from the space station

By
Add as a preferred source on Google
 

A day ahead of Thanksgiving, astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have offered personal messages for folks back on the ground. The space station inhabitants also revealed how they’ll be celebrating the special day inside the orbiting laboratory 250 miles above Earth.

Recommended Videos

Happy Thanksgiving from the International Space Station! This year, the crew hopes celebrate by watching football, sharing a meal together, and calling loved ones at home.

The crew shares what they're most thankful for, and what's on the menu for the big day. pic.twitter.com/Z69bLJnNBj

— NASA's Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) November 23, 2020

Four Americans are currently aboard the space station, including Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and Michael Hopkins, who arrived there a week ago aboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft. Kate Rubins, who arrived last month aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, is also part of the current Expedition 64 crew.

In a short video posted online (above), Rubins said it would be “awesome and special” to be able to celebrate Thanksgiving in space with an international crew that includes two Russian cosmonauts and a Japanese astronaut.

“We’re grateful to be up here,” Rubins said, “We’re very thankful for everybody that helps us out on the ground and supports us. I’m personally incredibly grateful that I have these wonderful new crewmates … and I’m just grateful that we are all able to share this moment with you.”

Rubins noted that the Americans on board the station will also be taking time out to speak with family and friends back on Earth.

The three other U.S. astronauts followed with their own messages, while Soichi Noguchi of Japan’s JAXA space agency revealed he’d brought along a few of his own nation’s dishes for the crew’s Thanksgiving meal — food that you certainly wouldn’t ordinarily associate with the American holiday (watch the video to find out what he has in store for them). Hopkins confirmed they’ll also be enjoying the more traditional dishes, albeit space versions.

For two of the Expedition 64 crew members, this isn’t their first time spending Thanksgiving aboard the space station, as both Walker and Hopkins have experienced the holiday in space on previous missions.

The Expedition 64 crew will spend their Thanksgiving in space, but for @NASA_Astronauts Shannon Walker and Mike Hopkins, it's their second Thanksgiving aboard the @Space_Station!

Thanksgiving history on station: https://t.co/FbQ34bPDGB. pic.twitter.com/yoZQC6WiE6

— NASA's Johnson Space Center (@NASA_Johnson) November 24, 2020

This month, NASA and its international partners have also been celebrating 20 years of continuous human habitation aboard the International Space Station. Check out this collection of astronaut videos showing how inhabitants of the orbiting outpost work, rest, and play.

Trevor Mogg
Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Topics
NASA’s new telescope can see 100 times more sky than Hubble in a single shot
NASA just launched a $4 billion telescope to map billions of galaxies
NASA Roman Telescope Launch Featured

The Hubble telescope has an almost legendary status. Over the last three decades, Hubble gave us some of the most spectacular close-ups of the universe ever captured, and now, NASA’s newest space telescope wants to see the bigger picture. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope successfully launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:26 a.m. EDT on August 30. Roman is now beginning a roughly three-month journey toward the Sun-Earth L2 point, nearly a million miles away, where it will spend its primary five-year mission surveying huge portions of the cosmos.

Roman carries a 2.4-meter primary mirror, the same diameter as Hubble’s, but its Wide Field Instrument can capture a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s. NASA expects it to use that combination of sharpness and scale to map billions of galaxies, study dark matter and dark energy, and discover enormous numbers of previously unknown worlds.

Read more
NASA built the Roman Space Telescope to study dark matter, but it can also help protect Earth from killer asteroids
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope wasn't built to hunt asteroids, but it turns out to be great at it.
Nancy Grace Roman space telescope.

NASA is about to launch a telescope built to unlock some of the universe's biggest mysteries, and it turns out that same design could help protect Earth along the way.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch from Kennedy Space Center on August 30, 2026, with a primary mission focused on studying dark matter and dark energy - the invisible forces shaping galaxies and cosmic expansion. Researchers now say its unique design also makes it unexpectedly effective at spotting dangerous asteroids headed our way (via MIT Technology Review).

Read more
Space is becoming Bezos and Musk’s next data center site, and we have every reason to worry
The AI boom is coming for the night sky
How Vast's space station will look in orbit.

AI data centers already consume vast amounts of electricity and water on Earth, so Silicon Valley has begun looking somewhere considerably more spacious... literally.

Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, along with several other companies, have proposed enormous constellations of satellites designed to operate as orbital data centers. However, environmental groups and former space officials are now warning that putting them into orbit at the proposed scale could have severe consequences for Earth's atmosphere and the night sky.

Read more