Astronauts aboard the International Space Station didn’t let a little thing like distance get in the way of gratitude or a good meal.
“I just want my family to know how much I appreciate their love and support. Even though I’m going to be really far away and moving really fast, my heart is definitely with them,” Mark Vande Hei, one of seven astronauts housed aboard the ISS through the holidays, said in a NASA video shared from the outpost on Monday.
Five astronauts of the seven-person Expedition 66 crew gathered to film the YouTube video released Monday by NASA’s Johnson Space Center about how they will celebrate the holiday while in orbit, Space.com reported.
The 2021 astronaut Thanksgiving menu includes crab bisque, roast turkey, potatoes au gratin, candied yams and cherry blueberry cobbler, CNN reported.
“I’m going to do whatever I can to show how thankful I am for my crewmates. It’s wonderful having all of these folks up here. We haven’t been up here together that long, but wow it sure has been wonderful already,” Vande Hei added.
According to NASA, the international crew includes Russian cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov; NASA astronauts Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn, Kayla Barron and Vande Hei; and European Space Agency astronaut Matthias Maurer.
“We’ll be working but looking forward to an awesome meal together,” Barron said in the video. “We’ll invite our cosmonaut colleagues to join us, so it’s a very international Thanksgiving.”
Meanwhile, Chari said a traditional Thanksgiving turkey trot may not be a realistic activity in space, but he brought along special colored headbands for him and the crew to wear as they run off their holiday meal on the space station’s treadmill, CNN reported.
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