A record number of “earthlings” have come together in space to celebrate New Year
The 2022 New Year celebration has turned out to be the largest ever in orbit with 10 cosmonauts and astronauts in total on two stations, Russia’s space agency has said.
“New Year 2022 was celebrated in near-Earth orbit by ten earthlings: seven on the International Space Station and three on the Chinese Tiangong Space Station. This was the most crowded New Year’s ‘feast’ in orbit in the history of world manned space exploration,” Roscosmos said in a news release.
Roscosmos cosmonaut and ISS-66 expedition commander Anton Shkaplerov, who has celebrated four New Years in space during his career, shared some details of the “feast” held on the International Space Station (ISS) before it kicked off. He said there would be black caviar and mandarins as well as a traditional Russian New Year dish – dressed herring, known as ‘herring under a fur coat.’
Shkaplerov and his colleague Pyotr Dubrov even showed the process of making the dish in an Instagram video.
Like many people living away from their home countries, the space explorers raised their glasses (of apple juice) to toast the beginning of 2022 several times. First, at midnight Moscow time, then for Germany’s New Year, where the ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer is from, then at midnight Greenwich Mean Time – the ISS’s time zone, and finally at midnight Washington, DC time, for the NASA astronauts.
The arrival of the new year has been regularly celebrated in space since 1986, when the Soviet space station Mir was launched.
