As the International Space Station orbits the Earth this New Year’s Eve, Joseph Acaba will see sunrises 16 times from space.
In 2004, Joe Acaba became the first person of Puerto Rican heritage to be named as a NASA astronaut candidate.
On Sept 12, 2017, Acaba and his crewmates from NASA and cosmonauts of the Russian space agency launched on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. They are scheduled to return to Earth in March 2018.
While on the International Space Station, the crew members will continue hundreds of experiments in biology, biotechnology, physical science and Earth science aboard humanity’s only permanently occupied orbiting lab.
On New Year’s Day, Acaba and the team on the orbital laboratory are among the few people who will experience 16 sunrise and sunsets 250 miles above Earth, as the space station orbits the planet once every 90 minutes.
The six Expedition 54 crew members spent Christmas sharing a meal and opening presents delivered on recent cargo missions to the International Space Station as they orbited the Earth, NASA said.
Chili, photos, and old reel tapes
In a new NASA video, International Space Station crewmembers shared some of their favorite memories of ringing in a new year back on earth and give us an idea of what it will be like to watch our planet enter 2018 from their orbital outpost 250 miles above.
Acaba said that when he was a kid, his family would always host a New Year’s party, and at midnight, his father would serve homemade chili.
“The big treat for staying up that late was my dad’s chili,” Acaba said. “We’ll see what we do up here [on the space station], if I can even stay up that late. I think we have vegetarian chili, and we’ll see how that competes.”
It’s just not chili that Joe Acaba blames on his father. In a video “Astronaut moments with Joe Acaba,” he talked about why he became an astronaut.
“ When we were younger as a family we would get together and we would look at family photos and family films, the old reel to reel tapes that we don’t have nowadays. And as part of that, my grandfather and my father were really interested in the Apollo missions and so they’d show us those tapes so, even though I wasn’t watching them live, I did feel like I was at that time and that really got me thinking about space. Also as a, a young kid I liked to read a lot of science fiction and that opened up just tons of possibilities and it kind of got me thinking about maybe some day becoming an astronaut.”
Two-time station resident Joe Acaba was selected by NASA in 2004. The California native has logged a total of 138 days in space during two missions.
In 2009, Acaba flew aboard STS-119 on the Space Shuttle Discovery to the International Space Station to deliver the final pair of power-generating solar array wings and a truss element. During this mission, he conducted two spacewalks. In 2012, Acaba flew aboard a Soyuz spacecraft to the space station where he worked as Flight Engineer for the Expedition 31/32.
During this mission, the first commercial resupply spacecraft, SpaceX Dragon, arrived at the station. Acaba recently served as Director of Operations Russia in Star City supporting crew training in Soyuz and Russian Segment systems.
Acaba was named one of the top Hispanics in technology in 2011 by Hispanic Engineer and Information Technology magazine.
Keep up with the latest on Joe Acaba @AstroAcaba
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been tasked with…
Brown and Caldwell, a leading environmental engineering and construction firm,…
Humboldt State University, one of four campuses within the California…
