This week, Gardeners Off World is blasting off to celebrate an off-world Thanksgiving. Let’s rehydrate some turkey!
The third Skylab crew – astronauts Gerald Carr, William Pogue and Edward Gibson – celebrated the first Thanksgiving in space in 1973. They didn’t get the day off, though, and Gibson and Pogue suited up and stepped out of the Skylab for a six-hour and 33-minute spacewalk. (Their punishing schedule later led to the infamous Skylab Mutiny.)
The second thanksgiving in space was a little more relaxed:
“And when we were done [eating] we didn’t go watch a football game on TV. We went to the window and watched the Earth go by at five miles a second. I can’t imagine a better way to celebrate a Thanksgiving unless you’re with your friends and family.”
In 1991, Fred Gregory was one of the first astronauts to eat a second Thanksgiving dinner in space. “Just as on earth,” he says, “our feelings about Thanksgiving in space weren’t determined by the quality or the appearance of the meal—but by the people we shared it with.”
Off-world Thanksgiving then became an international affair. In 1996, the STS-80 crew celebrated Thanksgiving aboard Space Shuttle Columbia, while astronaut John Blaha celebrated the holiday on Mir with cosmonauts Valery Korzun and Alexander Kaleri. In 1997, it was the turn of astronaut David Wolf to spend the holiday on Mir, as the STS-87 crew orbited the Earth aboard Space Shuttle Columbia.
The first crew to live on the ISS arrived on 2nd November 2000 and stayed for several months. Astronaut Bill Shepherd and cosmonauts Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev observed Thanksgiving with a dinner of ham and smoked turkey aboard the Zvezda module. They went on to be the first ISS crew to spend Christmas in orbit,
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