Miles O'Brien: Christmas aboard the International Space Station

Miles O'Brien

CNN Space Correspondent Miles O'Brien talks about the holiday celebration planned for the International Space Station. Dehydrated turkey will be served. He also tells of a dramatic past Christmas that celebrants spent orbiting the moon.

O'BRIEN: Christmas is a day off for the three-person crew of the International Space Station. They'll probably still do a little bit of work quite frankly, because there's so much to do up there on a daily basis just to keep things shipshape, so to speak.

But they won't have any official duties for getting the ship up and running, which is their main task during this four-month shakedown cruise.

Here's what the crew said they plan to do on Christmas Day: Commander Bill Shepherd said they will probably go to the trove of food in the galley and take out some dehydrated turkey, put some hot water on that and feast on it. He said they might even open up an extra pack or two just to have an official Christmas feast.

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Then, in their downtime, they plan to orient the space station in such a way that they can get a good view of the Earth.

Q: Will they be able to communicate with their families back home?

O'BRIEN: They do have the capability of engaging in two-way videoconferencing with the ground through a special computer system out of Houston.

They will have an opportunity to talk with their families and friends through that. So, it will be a quiet day up there for them relatively speaking. But knowing what I know about Commander Bill Shepherd, I suspect they'll probably break out a power tool here and there and do a little bit of work.

Q: Is this unusual for astronauts to be in space during Christmastime?

O'BRIEN: Certainly, the Russians have a long history of having cosmonauts in space during the Christmas holidays. Of course, bear in mind that their Christmas is on a different day than ours; they operate on a different calendar when it comes to those issues.

Nonetheless, over the 15-year life of Mir, there were several occasions when they were in space for Christmas. Going back further to the Salyut space station, they've had a lot of experience with astronauts up there over the holidays.

As for U.S. astronauts, a lot of people might recall Christmas of 1968 when Apollo 8 was on its famous, first-ever mission to travel to the moon. Commander Frank Borman, James Lovell and Bill Anders orbited the moon during Christmas. On Christmas Eve, the three of them got on the radio and took turns reading from the book of Genesis.

It was a very dramatic and emotional moment. The three of them received an Emmy Award for it later, because it was such compelling television. It was a moment in the midst of the heated space race with the Russians, where there was a sense of a higher purpose to the whole thing. It was also the first real triumph for the Apollo program after a series of setbacks, including the Apollo I fire in January of 1967.

That moment on Christmas Eve 1968, with those three Americans orbiting the moon in their Apollo spacecraft reading from the book of Genesis, is a moment to remember.

In 1973, on Skylab 4, three astronauts -- Gerry Carr, Bill Pogue and Ed Gibson -- also conducted a live Christmas Eve broadcast appealing for world peace. On Christmas Day, two of those astronauts conducted a seven-hour spacewalk to repair a telescope attached to Skylab.

More recently, this time last year, there was a space shuttle in orbit. The Space Shuttle Discovery was flying the third Hubble repair mission. The astronauts had a successful series of spacewalks to repair and upgrade the Hubble telescope. That mission occurred over Christmas, not out of design, but by accident after a series of delays with the launch.

So, it's not unprecedented to have astronauts up in space during Christmas. If NASA has its way, the hope is that there will never be another Christmas where there aren't astronauts up in space. That's the goal of the space station program: to keep human beings in space indefinitely.

Q: Do they go immediately back to work the day after Christmas this year?

O'BRIEN: Yes, December 26 will be a very busy day. In some ways, it might temper their enthusiasm for taking the day off on Christmas. Again, I have a hunch they'll be doing a little bit of prep work on Christmas Day.

What they're going to do on December 26 is they are going to attempt to re-dock with an unmanned progress supply vehicle. This vehicle initially docked back in November, carrying all kinds of supplies for the crew. The crew had just a couple weeks to unload it and stow the gear.

The craft also serves as the orbit version of the trashman. The space station crew puts in a lot of their waste and other trash that is generated by their activities. Then, the trash is sent down into a fiery descent. You might call it the world's most expensive incinerator.

In any case, the docking didn't go as planned back in November. There were two automated docking systems that didn't work properly. There was a software problem. And so what happened was the Soyuz commander, who is aboard the ISS, guided the progress ship in manually.

The Russians want to know why the automated system failed. So, they came up with a software patch to try to fix the problem. The progress vehicle, instead of being sent away on December 1, has been parked in orbit. They're going to try to dock it again on December 26 to see if that software patch works.

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NASA
  • International Space Station

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