Christmas tree on the ISS space station

6 ISS travelers cannot go home for Tet, but they still do their best to have a happy Christmas at a height of hundreds of miles from Earth.

Living in a zero-gravity lab worth $ 100 billion, they also party to celebrate Christmas as hundreds of millions of other Earth people. They also decorated ISS with ornaments brought up from the Earth, gathered gifts and greeting cards that friends and family gave, and assigned to cook jubilant parties, NASA pilots Dan Burbank , current command of the revelation station with Space.com.

The ISS station also has an artificial Christmas tree with a height of about 60cm.

Until last 23, Burbank only stayed on ISS with two other Russian colleagues, Anton Shkaplerov and Anatoly Ivanishin. However, in the late afternoon of the same day, they picked up three new " stationmates " , three Russian astronauts from Russia's Souyuz spacecraft launched from Kazakhstan earlier last week.

'Of course their presence will bring a cheerful atmosphere to the station, but we dare not expect anything into the real gift. When you are in space, you will not be able to waste the capacity of the ship launching from the ground for such things. Every millimeter is as precious as gold, ' said Don Pettit, one of three new astronauts on the ISS station.

However, it was quite surprising that there was still a 60cm high artificial Christmas tree on the ISS station, with the original enough to hold one or two gift packages.

'The feeling of being away from home is very difficult, and when you turn around the earth, seeing people under the Earth enjoying the festive atmosphere, the feeling of distance is even stronger,' Burbank admitted. Even so, loneliness is an unfamiliar word for them.

'We still get communication from the ground. And if a member feels sad, they can always look out the window, admire the spectacular spectacle from space. This is the most beautiful Christmas card you can imagine , 'Burbank wrote on his personal blog.