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The International Space Station is about the same size as an American Football field. | Credit: NASA
Are you ready to catch the big game? On Sunday (Feb. 9), across the United States and around the world, Americans and American football fans will tune in to watch the top two teams in the National Football League (NFL) go head-to-head in the ultimate post-season game, and even astronauts living in space will have the chance to watch the action live.
Sunday evening, the American Football Conference (AFC) champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, will face off against the National Football Conference (NFC) champions, the Philadelphia Eagles, in Super Bowl LIX. Kickoff for the big matchup is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. ET (2330 GMT), with coverage provided by the Fox Broadcasting Company.
Many Americans will gather at watch parties and sports bars to cheer on their favorite team, contribute to the consumption of an estimated 1.4 billion chicken wings, and exercise general merriment for the occasion. And the watch parties don’t have to be limited to Earth.
NASA will be providing a live uplink of the Super Bowl to the International Space Station (ISS), should the astronauts onboard “choose to stay up to watch it,” a Johnson Space Center official told Space.com. For them, it will be extra late at night.
An astronaut’s day aboard the ISS is not attuned to any time zone in the United States. The “international” in “International Space Station,” means that astronauts of multiple nationalities are normally working aboard the space station together, and need to coordinate with mission control teams on opposite sides of the planet.
Another reason lies in the fact that the space station experiences a new sunrise every 45 minutes as it orbits the planet at 17,500 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour), so basing you sleep cycle on what daylight peeps through the station’s windows would obviously be chaos.
As such, the ISS operates on Coordinated Universal Time, UTC, also known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). This puts NASA astronauts aboard the station 5-6 hours ahead of mission control in Houston, Texas (depending on Daylight Savings Time). So, for any of NASA’s astronaut cohort on orbit to watch the game, kickoff isn’t actually until 11:30 p.m.
There are four NASA astronauts currently living aboard the ISS. Expedition 72 commander Suni Williams and flight engineer Butch Wilmore launched to the station in Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft last June. Their 10-day mission turned into nearly 10 months after NASA decided to land Starliner back on Earth uncrewed. They were joined a few months later by astronauts Don Pettit, who launched to the station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and Nick Hague, who launched on the SpaceX Crew-9 Dragon tasked with returning Williams and Wilmore along with Hague and his crewmate Alexandr Gorbunov of Russia’s space agency Roscosmos.
RELATED STORIES:
— International Space Station: Everything you need to know about the orbital laboratory
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— Space mysteries: How does the ISS stay in orbit without falling to Earth?
As of now, there are no on-orbit messages or content planned for the astronauts in relation to Super Bowl LIX, a NASA spokesperson told Space.com, but any of the crew are free to watch NASA’s uplink. As for which teams the astronauts might be rooting for, NASA officials said they were “unable to speculate,” and none of the astronauts replied to requests for comments.
Thinking as an astronaut might, though, with respect for certain American symbolisms, dedication of service to my country and an affinity for extreme altitudes, I imagine NASA’s finest would have to root for the team that gave them wings to soar all the way to space. And, with that in mind, I suspect they’ll all be chanting:
“Fly, Eagles, fly!”
