A Thanksgiving dinner in orbit might sound like science fiction, but for one astronaut and his crewmates, it just became very real — and that’s where this story gets surprisingly emotional. As an American and two Russian partners blasted off toward the International Space Station (ISS) on Thanksgiving Day, their journey turned a familiar family holiday into a powerful symbol of international cooperation, personal legacy and cutting-edge space science.
Chris Williams, a NASA astronaut and grandson of Panamanian immigrants, launched aboard the Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft alongside Russian cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev, beginning an approximately eight-month stay on the ISS. Williams has publicly reflected on how meaningful it is that someone with his family background is now representing the United States “in the heavens,” highlighting how space exploration can reflect broader social progress and opportunity — a point that some may see as inspiring, while others might debate how inclusive spaceflight truly is today. Their mission happened to start on Thanksgiving, turning a routine crew rotation into a headline-grabbing holiday liftoff.
The trio’s journey from Earth to orbit was fast compared to the long sea voyage Williams’ ancestors once took, and arguably even shorter than many holiday car trips happening across the United States. Launching at 4:27 a.m. EST (0927 GMT, 2:27 p.m. local time) from the historic Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, their Soyuz 2.1a rocket was adorned with colorful artwork created by pediatric cancer patients and images of the first astronaut and cosmonauts to live aboard the ISS 25 years earlier — a poignant reminder that spaceflight often intertwines hope, history and human struggle.
Flying under the call sign “Gyrfalcon,” a bird of prey that also appears on their mission patch, the Soyuz MS-28 crew reached orbit and soon saw the classic sign that gravity had effectively “let go.” Two small crocheted dolls, used as zero-gravity indicators, began to float freely: one was a ginger cat named “Gizmo,” a gift from a cosmonaut’s family, and the other was a knitted cosmonaut made by schoolchildren in the Russian town of Gagarin, named for Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space. These tiny mascots offered a warm, human touch to a highly technical mission — and raise an interesting question: do these symbolic objects help make spaceflight feel more accessible, or are they just charming traditions in an otherwise elite enterprise?
Waiting on the ISS are the seven members of Expedition 73: commander Sergey Ryzhikov and flight engineers Alexey Zubritsky and Oleg Platonov of Roscosmos, NASA astronauts Jonny Kim, Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, and JAXA astronaut Kimiya Yui. Once Soyuz MS-28 docks to the Zvezda service module (about three hours after launch) and the hatches open around 10:10 a.m. EST (1510 GMT), the station’s population will gather for a shared meal — a “sit-down” Thanksgiving feast that just happens to be happening roughly 400 kilometers above Earth.
Veteran astronaut Mike Fincke, who is celebrating his second Thanksgiving in space, has said he “highly recommends” the experience and previewed some of the menu items in a NASA video. Traditional foods like turkey and cranberry sauce are on the table — or more accurately, in pouches and containers — but the spread also includes more unexpected dishes, such as crab, salmon and even lobster, prepared and packaged by the food lab at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston as part of a special “Holiday Bulk Overwrapped Bag” (BOB) shipped to the station in September. It might prompt some debate: with so much emphasis on cost and efficiency in spaceflight, should holiday comfort foods and “luxury” items like lobster be standard, or do they play an essential role in crew morale during long missions?
After the holiday celebrations, the station’s crew lineup will shift when Ryzhikov, Zubritsky and Kim depart for Earth aboard Soyuz MS-27 in early December. At that point, Williams, Kud-Sverchkov and Mikaev will join Cardman, Fincke, Yui and Platonov to form the new Expedition 74 crew, taking on responsibility for a wide slate of scientific experiments, technology demonstrations, potential spacewalks and general station upkeep for the remainder of their mission.
During his time in orbit, Williams will play a key role in deploying and testing the European Enhanced Exploration Exercise Device (E4D), a modular exercise system designed for long-duration missions that combines cycling, rowing and resistance training with rope-pulling and climbing functions. Improving exercise hardware in space is crucial for maintaining astronauts’ muscles and bones on future missions to the Moon or Mars, and E4D’s versatility could spark debate over whether such multi-purpose systems should become the new standard for deep-space exploration habitats.
Williams will also conduct research aimed at boosting the efficiency of cryogenic fuels, which are vital for many launch systems and in-space propulsion, and will help grow semiconductor crystals in microgravity to better understand how to produce higher-quality materials for electronics. In addition, he will contribute to efforts to refine NASA’s re-entry safety protocols — work that could influence how future crews are protected during the intense, high-risk phase of returning through Earth’s atmosphere. These projects underscore a broader tension: should crew time prioritize fundamental science, or should the focus lean more heavily toward mission safety and hardware optimization?
On the Russian side of the station, Kud-Sverchkov and Mikaev will make history by being the first cosmonauts to use GigaChat, an artificial intelligence assistant designed to support operational decisions in the Russian segment. Interacting with GigaChat via voice and tablet input, they will rely on the AI to help analyze information and offer suggestions, potentially making daily tasks more efficient. Yet this introduces a provocative question that could divide opinion: how much decision-making authority should be handed over to AI systems in a high-stakes environment where human lives are on the line?
For both Williams and Mikaev, this flight marks their debut in space, whereas Kud-Sverchkov is on his second mission, having previously spent 185 days on the ISS as part of Expedition 63/64 in 2021. Before becoming a cosmonaut in 2010, Kud-Sverchkov, now 42, worked as a rocket engineer for RSC Energia, Russia’s leading human spaceflight contractor, giving him deep technical experience with the very systems he now relies on in orbit.
Mikaev, 39, came to the cosmonaut corps from the Russian Air Force, where he served as a military pilot before being selected for spaceflight training in 2018. Williams, also 42, built an unusual career path that bridges astrophysics, medicine and engineering: he earned a Ph.D. in physics, studied supernovae using the Very Large Array radio telescope, then completed medical residency training at Harvard, where he contributed to new image-guidance methods for cancer treatment. He joined NASA in 2021 and is the second member of his astronaut class, nicknamed “The Flies,” to fly into space — a detail that hints at the friendly, sometimes quirky culture inside astronaut groups.
Although many crews have celebrated Thanksgiving in orbit before, the Soyuz MS-28 team is the first to actually launch on Thanksgiving Day itself. That timing makes their mission a kind of symbolic case study in how space exploration intersects with national holidays, public attention and even soft power; some may see the holiday launch as a clever way to boost public interest and foster goodwill, while others might ask whether tying missions to symbolic dates is worth the added scheduling complexity.
The article’s author, Robert Pearlman, is a veteran space historian and journalist who founded collectSPACE.com, an online news site and community focused on space history and its links with popular culture. Pearlman also writes for Space.com and co-authored the book “Space Stations: The Art, Science, and Reality of Working in Space,” published by Smithsonian Books in 2018, blending technical insight with cultural context.
Pearlman’s contributions to the field have been widely recognized: he was inducted into the U.S. Space Camp Hall of Fame in 2009, received the American Astronautical Society’s Ordway Award for Sustained Excellence in Spaceflight History in 2021, and was honored with the Kolcum News and Communications Award from the National Space Club Florida Committee in 2023 for his work in telling the story of spaceflight along Florida’s Space Coast and beyond. These accolades highlight how chronicling space exploration — not just flying the missions — can itself shape public understanding and debate about why humanity goes to space in the first place.
So, what do you think: should launches on significant holidays like Thanksgiving be celebrated as powerful symbols of unity and progress, or do they risk turning serious missions into media events? And how comfortable are you with AI tools like GigaChat helping steer decisions on the space station — is it an exciting leap forward or a step too far toward automated control in human spaceflight? Share where you stand: do you feel inspired, skeptical, or somewhere in between when you imagine astronauts carving “turkey” while circling Earth at 17,500 miles per hour?
