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Multinational team of space pioneers aboard orbital outpost celebrate Cosmonautics Day

The ISS crew customarily marks holidays in orbit

ISS, April 13. /TASS Special Correspondent, Cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev/. The cosmonauts working aboard the International Space Station (ISS) invited their foreign counterparts to the service module of the ISS Russian segment to celebrate Cosmonautics Day.

The crew members gathered for a festive lunch after the working day and drank juice in honor of the April 12 celebration. All the 11 teammates working aboard the orbital outpost gathered in the Russian module: Roscosmos cosmonauts Denis Matveyev, Sergey Korsakov along with TASS reporter Oleg Artemyev, US astronauts Raja Chari, Thomas Marshburn and Kayla Barron, Germany’s Matthias Maurer who is an astronaut with the European Space Agency (ESA), former NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria and three businessmen from the United States, Israel and Canada - Larry Connor, Eytan Stibbe and Mark Pathy, respectively. The ISS international team snapped a commemorative photo.

The ISS crew customarily marks holidays in orbit. In particular, last year’s Thanksgiving Day was celebrated aboard the flying laboratory with traditional treats for the US festivity adapted for extra-terrestrial conditions: a smoked turkey and alcohol-free cider.

Cosmonautics Day is celebrated on April 12 worldwide, and 2022 marked the 61st anniversary of the Vostok launch vehicle orbiting the Vostok-1 spacecraft with Soviet cosmonaut Yury Gagarin as the world’s first human in space. The Vostok-1 spaceship made one orbit around the planet and Gagarin returned to Earth on the same day. He ejected from a descent capsule and parachuted down near the village of Smelovka in the Saratov Region.

On November 17, 2021, Russia’s world-renowned TASS news agency and the State Space Corporation Roscosmos signed a memorandum of cooperation, under which a TASS news office was established aboard the ISS. Presently, cosmonaut Artemyev is heading the outer space-based branch. Cosmonaut Alexander Misurkin was the first TASS special reporter in space. His flight lasted 12 days.

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