Space Exploration and Religious Observance

Rebecca J. Rosen

July 16, 2012

The Atlantic

Before the launch this weekend of three human beings into the ether of space around the Earth, before they boarded their Soyuz spacecraft, and before the rockets were fired, precautions were taken. Not the humdrum checklists and redundancies of space exploration -- assessing the weather, the equipment, the math -- but a preparation with a more mystical dimension: the blessing, by a Russian Orthodox priest, of the spacecraft, as it sat on the launchpad on the Kazakh steppe.

The scene, as shown in NASA photographs such as the one above, presents a tableau that seems incongruent, but may just be fitting.

The True Cross Circles the Earth 16 Times a Day

The Gospels, four icons, crosses and a relic of the True Cross are aboard the Russian segment of the International Space Station (ISS). A photo taken by the station crew shows an icon and a crucifix floating in zero gravity in the ISS.

The True Cross was given to A.N. Merminov, the head of Roscosmos, by the late Patriarch of Moscow Aleksy II. The Cross was delivered to the station in 2006 by the crew of Soyuz TMA-8.

Fr. Job Talats: "In Space You Can See the Grace of God"

His Holiness Patriarch Kyrill is shown around the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre and the cockpit of a spacecraft. "Space flights are in accordance with divine will, to the extent that they provide man with the opportunity to improve himself," he had stated in November.

The confessor of the cosmonauts at the Yuri Gagarin Training Centre near Moscow speaks of God and of Creation with his flock, even when it is in orbit around the Earth.

January 30, 2011

To Vima

"Did you see God when you went up there?" This question - often sarcastically posed, sometimes with sincerity, and for others quite naggingly - is repeatedly asked of the members of space missions after their return to Earth. American astronauts had given a reply to that question - and their words were stamped in history - that... they had seen His footprints. Russian cosmonauts on the contrary would not tolerate or make any such quips on matters like these. In the atheist Soviet Union where religion was "the opium of the people", God didn't exist. Until the 1980's. Today, in Vladimir Putin's Russia, conditions are different. Russian cosmonauts admit they have their own confessor, with whom they communicate at any given moment, even when they are in space, just before embarking on their space walk.