The 6 astronauts aboard the International Space Station can't come home for a holidays, though they're doing their best to make a deteriorate splendid hundreds of miles above Earth's surface.
The spaceflyers have embellished a halls of a $100 billion orbiting lab, and â€" like many of us Earthbound folks â€" they devise to applaud Christmas with a celebration and a feast.
"We've already put adult decorations, and we've collected together all a cards and gifts that a friends and families have sent to us, and we're formulation a integrate of large meals," NASA wanderer Dan Burbank, commander of a space station's stream , pronounced final week. "That'll be great."
Skeleton organisation no more
Burbank and dual cosmonaut colleagues, Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin, had been holding down a orbital installation by themselves until Friday (Dec. 23).
On that date, they were assimilated by 3 new crewmates, who arrived aboard a Soyuz booster dual days after rising from Kazakhstan's snowy Baikonur Cosmodrome. []
The further of American Don Pettit, Russian Oleg Kononenko, and Dutchman Andre Kuipers brought a space hire behind adult to a . The 3 newcomers will minister some Christmas hearten to a festivities, though small in a approach of tangible presents.
"In terms of gifts, when you're off in a frontier, you're not going to rubbish upmass on something like that," Pettit told SPACE.com in a preflight interview.
Despite those mass constraints, a satisfactory bit of holiday aptitude has done it adult to a orbiting lab given NASA and a general partners began building a 431-ton structure in 1998. There's even a two-foot-tall artificial Christmas tree underneath that a benefaction or dual can be wedged.
Christmas in space
The holidays can be tough for people distant from their friends and family â€" and zipping around a world 240 miles (386 kilometers) above your 7 billion associate Earthlings imposes a special kind of separation.
But Burbank pronounced he and his other crewmembers don't feel too waste or isolated.
"In a really genuine sense, we're not distant from those who caring about us," he said. "For one thing, we have hundreds of people worldwide in control centers examination over us and a space hire 24/7. And we also know that a families and friends are meditative about us and ancillary us each step of a way."
Besides, if a crewmates ever start feeling down, there's always that extraordinary perspective out a window.
"Our world is so beautiful, pacific and relaxed when we demeanour during it from space â€" a many pleasing holiday label we could imagine," Burbank wrote Dec. 17 on a wanderer blog .
SPACE.com partner handling editor Clara Moskowitz (@) contributed to this story. You can follow SPACE.com comparison author Mike Wall on Twitter: . Follow SPACE.com for a latest in space scholarship and scrutiny news on Twitter and on .
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