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The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Crew Dragon capsule, is being read for NASA’s first active commercial crew mission at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
REUTERS
Their Christmas was out of this world – but they have only peace on Earth.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station will welcome the season back to Earth, sending a message of “suffering” to everyone in the midst of a coronavirus pandemic.
“The strength of the human spirit is something we can celebrate in this special season,” said NASA astronaut Victor Glover. said in a video this week.
Resilience is also the name of the SpaceX rocket that brought Glover and three others – NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins and Shannon Walker and Japanese space program astronaut Soichi Noguchi – to the ISS in November.
“We chose that name in honor of people around the world and the teams that will help make our mission possible in a year that has changed our lives,” said Hopkins, crew leader.
“We would also like to remember all those who lost this year.”
Glover said: “There could not have been a more appropriate name to describe 2020.”
The four joined NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov on the space station last month.
The whole team wasn’t away at Christmas and spent the day sharing holiday meals together and calling family and friends. They will too deck of halls of the ISS with festive decoration.