With a naval officer in charge of the Worldwide House Station (ISS), it might need appeared apparent that New 12 months’s Day in 2001 would carry a corresponding naval custom. Expedition 1 Commander Invoice Shepherd of NASA and his Russian crewmates Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko rang within the begin of what grew to become the US’ darkest yr—the yr of 9/11—with personal household conferences and an consciousness {that a} busy few weeks lay forward.
The toddler station had simply obtained its first set of huge power-generating photo voltaic arrays and early in 2001 one other House Shuttle crew was set to ship its Future lab for expanded command, management and scientific functionality. Spending New 12 months in orbit was nothing new; since Skylab 4 in 1973-1974, the transition has been celebrated each by Individuals and Russians, Japanese and Italians, Dutchmen and Canadians, Frenchmen and Britons, Germans and for the primary time in 2023 a citizen of Denmark.
All handed from one yr into the subsequent quietly, watching the Residence Planet for the merest glimpse of Earthly fireworks and marveling on the achievements of the previous yr and sharing hopefulness for the promise of the subsequent. Aboard the ISS tonight are seven souls—Expedition 70 Commander Andreas Mogensen, a European House Company (ESA) astronaut from Denmark, along with Russian cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko, Konstantin Borisov and Nikolai Chub, NASA’s Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara and Japan Aerospace Exploration Company (JAXA) flyer Satoshi Furukawa—and the 2023/2024 turnover marks the primary time that as many as 4 sovereign nations could have spent a New 12 months collectively in orbit.
In a current space-to-ground message, the Expedition 70 crew shared their ideas in regards to the vacation season and their hopes for the brand new yr to return. “Throughout New 12 months vacation in Japan,” mentioned Furukawa, “it’s common that the entire household will get collectively.
“Individuals go to the shrine and pray for New 12 months’s happiness,” he continued. “From the Worldwide House Station, I want all of you countless happiness and smiles.”
Because the New 12 months started greater than 20 years in the past, in 2001 Shepherd honored his army background by sharing a poem about his expertise aboard the ISS. “In long-standing naval custom,” he defined, “the primary entry in a ship’s log for the New 12 months is all the time recorded in prose.”
And with out additional ado, he waxed lyrical about his crew’s journey, “orbiting excessive above Earth…touring our destined journey past realm of sea voyage or flight.” Shepherd wrote about ringing in a brand new period as Earth itself revolved, “counting the final thousand years executed”, for 1 January 2001—though the second yr of a brand new decade—truly marked the official begin of the twenty first century.
Then Shepherd added an fascinating remark to his piece: “Fifteen midnights to this evening in orbit; a clockwork not of earthly tempo.” For as he, Krikalev and Gidzenko circled the globe at 17,500 mph (28,100 km/h), they handed by way of quite a few terrestrial time zones and “noticed” quite a few New Years.
For Shepherd, being on this “new age and place” on such a big date carried a juxtaposition of the romance and journey of the previous and the scientific and technological prospects of the long run. As he watched “screens dancing shapes in pale glow / We information her course by digital pulse” and acknowledged the vital position performed by his ship’s photo voltaic panels and stabilizing gyroscopes, he couldn’t escape from the fact that this had few of the navigational gadgets of previous.
“On this ship’s deck,” Shepherd wrote, “sits no helm now / Rudder, sheet and rigs lengthy since gone / however right here nonetheless—a pull to go locations / Past traces the place sky meets the daybreak.” Nonetheless, his prose was laced with traces of older occasions: Although star trackers mark Altair and Vega, similar as mariners eyed way back, we’re nonetheless as wayfinders of data, in search of new issues that mankind ought to know.
In fact, the station runs on Greenwich Imply Time (GMT) and Shepherd and his males had their very own “official” immediate of midnight and the daybreak of the New 12 months, however the peculiarity of their place aroused fascination again on Earth. Despite their on-board clocks, they exchanged earlier greetings with mission controllers in Moscow (at GMT+3 hours) and later ones with Houston, Texas (at GMT-6 hours).
Shepherd’s Expedition 1 crew was certainly not the primary crew of spacefarers to see within the New 12 months from past the veil of Earth. Again in 1973-74, astronauts Gerry Carr, Ed Gibson and Invoice Pogue—have been six weeks into their 84-day Skylab 4 mission once they endured (reasonably than loved) the passage of 1 yr into the subsequent.
The primary a part of their flight left them excessively overworked and exhausted, and on 28 December 1973 Carr had a heart-to-heart with Mission Management. Two days later, it was agreed that routine chores could be positioned on a so-called “procuring record,” to be accomplished when time permitted, and the crew have been to be left unhassled throughout meal occasions and undisturbed after dinner within the night.
At across the similar time, on the twenty ninth, Carr and Gibson carried out a spacewalk to gather micrometeoroid samples and {photograph} Comet Kohoutek, which was seen in Earth’s skies that winter. “We noticed a beautiful factor,” recalled Carr in a NASA oral historical past, “small, faint, however beautiful.”
Through the years, a number of Soviet and Russian crews spent New 12 months in orbit. Yuri Romanenko and Georgi Grechko celebrated the daybreak of 1978 aboard the Salyut 6 area station, as did Vladimir Titov and Musa Manarov from Mir in 1988. From then on, each New 12 months till 1999 would see at the very least two people in orbit on Mir, together with a feminine cosmonaut—Yelena Kondakova—along with Germany’s Thomas Reiter and NASA astronauts John Blaha and Dave Wolf.
With nobody in area on the daybreak of 2000, there adopted a resumption of exercise from 2001 to the current day aboard the ISS. Of the Nineteen Nineties, little element emerged about how the transition from one yr to the subsequent was celebrated, though the daybreak of 1998 was marked by a failure of Mir’s movement management system pc.
In the course of the restoration course of, your entire station—save for the bottom block and the Kvant-1 astrophysics module—was powered down as {an electrical} conservation measure. With the departure of Mir’s second-to-last crew in August 1999, the station was left unoccupied for the transition into 2000, and it was Invoice Shepherd’s Expedition 1 crew who celebrated the subsequent New 12 months, excessive above Earth.
Since then, every 1 January has seen at the very least two spacefarers circling the Residence Planet. Expedition 4 crewmen Yuri Onufrienko, Carl Walz and Dan Bursch loved a serene New 12 months in 2002, stress-free and speaking to household and mates.
A yr later, Expedition 6’s Ken Bowersox, Nikolai Budarin and Don Pettit noticed the daybreak of 2003 throughout their official sleep shift. “The primary day of the New 12 months,” famous a NASA press launch, “concerned just a few routine upkeep duties, train and time without work for the crew.”
Precisely a month later, on 1 February, shuttle Columbia and her complete crew have been misplaced throughout re-entry and NASA was thrust into one of many worst crises in its existence. Though the ISS continued to be occupied, because of the assured crew return functionality provided by Russia’s Soyuz craft, the outpost would host solely a skeleton workers of two males for the New Years of 2004, 2005 and 2006, every remaining aboard for rotating six-month excursions.
Crews returned to 3 members from New 12 months 2007, doubled to 6 in New 12 months 2011 and seven-person operations have been routine since 2021. “It is a good time,” mentioned Pettit as he grew to become the primary American to rejoice a second New 12 months in orbit in 2012, “to mirror upon the place we have now all been and the place we’d need to go.”
All advised, together with Expedition 70, no fewer than 116 people—together with 17 ladies—from ten sovereign nations have spent New 12 months in orbit. Twenty-one folks have spent two New Years off the planet, 4 have executed so thrice and Russia’s Anton Shkaplerov has seen the passage of 1 yr to the subsequent no fewer than 4 occasions from this distinctive Earth-circling perch.
Tonight, as Mogensen and his Expedition 70 crew gaze down on the planet of their beginning, they may probably take time to mirror on the station’s home windows. And because the world ushers in 2024, they may certainly share earnest hopes for a greater yr to return.
