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NASA Astronauts Celebrate Fourth of July in Space, Send Message From ISS

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Happy Fourth of July from the only two Americans currently living 250 miles above Earth.

NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Nick Hague, who are currently aboard the International Space Station serving as flight engineers on the orbiting space lab’s Expedition 60, sent an Independence Day video message home on Wednesday.

In the video, posted to Twitter, the two astronauts, wearing star-spangled suits, can also be seen in an American flag-adorned space station.

“As we orbit our planet high above you, we want to take a moment and wish all Americans at home, and around the world, a very happy fourth of July,” said Koch. “Through history, our flag has traveled with humans and robots to the farthest reaches of the solar system as American ingenuity has pushed the boundaries of what is possible through grit, determination and imagination.”

Both Koch and Hague, who arrived at the ISS aboard a Soyuz spacecraft on March 14, 2019 with Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin, praised the country’s “astronauts, engineers, scientists and commercial companies taking the next giant leap for humankind,” and reminded space fans at home that there’s more to come.

“It’s an incredibly exciting time for spaceflight in America,” Hague said. “From the completion of the first flight in the commercial crew program to the unveiling of the bold plan to send the first woman and the next man to the moon by 2024, this is a unique moment in history in which we can cast our eyes to the sky and to the heavens and be proud to be an American.”

Selected as an astronaut by NASA in 2013, Koch is onboard the ISS on her first spaceflight as part of Expedition 59, 60 and upcoming Expedition 61 scheduled for October. She is slated to set a record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman with an expected total of 328 days in space, according to NASA.

Hague was also selected as an astronaut in 2013.  He was selected for a mission to the ISS which launched on October 11, 2018. Unfortunately, he and his crewmate Alexey Ovchinin, of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, were forced to abort the mission when a rocket booster experienced a malfunction shortly after the launch of their Soyuz MS-10. The aborted spacecraft landed safely.

For Independence Day, Koch, Hague, and Ovchinin have the day off, NASA officials said.

Their future Expedition 60 crewmates — NASA astronaut Andrew Morgan, the European Space Agency’s Luca Parmitano and cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov — will take a Fourth of July flight from Russia to their launch site, Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

Morgan, Parmitano and Skvortsov are scheduled to launch toward the ISS on July 20, the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

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