Holidays in astronaut style: A trip to space
Chinese astronauts spent the New Year in space on January 1, 2022.
Christmas, Hanukkah and New Year are often enjoyed with loved ones and friends. However, holiday celebrations in space have their own special traditions that astronauts and cosmonauts have developed.
Early on in the space programme, only a select few holidays were spent in space, most notably Apollo 8's orbit of the Moon over Christmas 1968. As missions got longer and more frequent, there were more holidays in space. The annual, though not entirely customary, habit of celebrating Christmas on the International Space Station has been going on for the past 22 years.
Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, and William A. Anders of the Apollo 8 crew, the first humans to leave Earth orbit, spent their first Christmas in space while circling the Moon in December 1968.
On Christmas Eve, while they transmitted images of the Moon drifting by below, they immortalised the occasion by alternately reading the first few passages of the Book of Genesis from the Bible. Their Christmas Eve programme was watched by an estimated 1 billion people in 64 nations. Lovell radioed back to Earth, where it was already Christmas Day, and said, “Please be informed there is a Santa Claus!" as they departed lunar orbit.
Gerald P. Carr, William R. Pogue and Edward G. Gibson of Skylab 4 spent Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year in space during their 84-day-long record-breaking missions in 1973 and 1974 aboard the Skylab space station. The first crew to celebrate Thanksgiving and New Year in space. They constructed a makeshift Christmas tree from discarded food containers, added coloured decals as ornaments and topped it with a cardboard comet cutout.
For the first time ever, Chinese astronauts spent the New Year in space on January 1, 2022. In Beijing, Hong Kong and Macao, they organised a live video chat on New Year's Day 2022 and spoke with college students there. The space station was decorated in honour of the beginning of the Chinese New Year of the Tiger on February 1 and greetings for a joyous and prosperous new year were conveyed to those on Earth.
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