Turkey, football headline Thanksgiving for 6 astronauts

Astronauts at the International Space Station are planning to spend Thanksgiving in quite a traditional fashion: There will be a turkey dinner with all the trimmings, good company, and football.

In their yearly recorded holiday greetings, NASA astronauts seem grateful for the opportunity to celebrate aboard the station, and stress the importance of working and sharing traditions with their global co-workers on the ISS.

While the two astronauts will work through the day Thursday (unlike many Americans who have the day off), they’re still planning to have a big meal with their four other global crewmembers that evening. “It’s just like Thanksgiving dinner”.

NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson, Soyuz MS-03 commander Oleg Novitskiy and European Space Agency flight engineer Thomas Pesquet arrived this past Saturday.

Turkey and football are on the menu tomorrow for the crew on the International Space Station.

NASA astronaut Shane Kimbrough shows off a pouch holding Thanksgiving turkey.

Dehydrated items will require the crew to add water before heating, including cornbread dressing, mashed potatoes and green beans and mushrooms. Strawberries and cherry-and-blueberry cobbler are to be used as a dessert.

Thanks to one USA college, astronauts can enjoy a Thanksgiving meal in space that’s just as delicious as their families are having back on Earth. “Our food is a little bit different”, he said of the pouches. Bonnie Dunbar, a retired NASA astronaut, told ABC Radio that this year’s Thanksgiving selections taste just like the real thing.

NASA has its sights set on a 10- to 14-day Orion mission around the moon with four crew members. There’ll be powdered sweet tea with lemon for Kimbrough, an Atlanta native.

“There’s no commercially-available bar right now that meets our needs”, Takiyah Sirmons, a food scientist with the Advanced Food Technology Team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said in the same statement.

Kimbrough said the US astronauts will celebrate the holiday with their global crew.